ChrisFM

Before Christopher Gomez ever called himself ChrisFM, he was already performing.

Not on a stage, exactly. More often, it was a classroom.

Gomez was the class clown, the kid willing to push the joke far enough to get himself in trouble if it meant everybody around him was laughing. Singing was different. That part of him stayed hidden. He was shy about his voice, worried somebody might hear him and laugh for an entirely different reason. At most, a girl might get a late-night serenade over the telephone, right up until somebody’s mother or father decided Christopher had called the house enough for one evening.

Music, however, was everywhere around him.

His biological father’s family included musicians, singers, songwriters and instrumentalists. His mother wrote poetry. His stepfather, the man Gomez considers his dad, opened the musical map even wider, introducing him to everything from classic bachata, salsa, merengue and bolero to Colombian music and rock from across South America.

Born in Del Rio and raised on Houston’s southwest side, Gomez grew up inside a cultural collision that eventually became one of his greatest creative advantages: Mexican-American, Chicano, Tex-Mex, Houston, and a strong Salvadoran influence at home. English and Spanish lived side by side. So did genres that were never supposed to share the same playlist.

At ten years old, he formed his first boy band with his brother, cousin and a friend from their apartment complex.

They called themselves Four Play.

There were four of them. It sounded cool. They were ten. Nobody bothered to explain the other meaning.

Gomez was the only singer. Everybody else danced.

The group disappeared almost as quickly as it arrived, and so did his first dream of performing. He would not seriously return to singing until age eighteen, when he wrote a song called “La Espina en mi Alma,” a song that would eventually become one of his singles. His mother let him turn her garage into an early creative laboratory, and that garage became home to many of his first demos.

Then life did what life does.

There were beginnings, stops, responsibilities, distractions and stretches when music simply did not return enough for the time being poured into it. Gomez eventually walked away from active music for roughly three years. He never completely stopped writing, but for a while he believed the performing and recording chapter might be over.

During that chapter away, another battle had become impossible to ignore.

Gomez’s weight eventually reached 611 pounds.

What followed was never a clean before-and-after story. There were victories and setbacks, bumps and bruises, and a fight that is honestly still ongoing. But somewhere inside all of it, Gomez lost more than half his body weight.

That chapter did not stay separate from the music eit

Awareness that time moves. That unfinished songs stay unfinished until somebody decides otherwise. That ideas deserve to become records. That records deserve to become worlds.

And that is where ChrisFM comes from.

The name is partly literal. Gomez spent twelve years working in radio. But the deeper meaning has less to do with where he worked and more to do with how he creates.

ChrisFM is a station that refuses to stay parked on one genre.

One transmission might be R&B. The next might be Tejano. Then country. Then something entirely in Spanish. Then English. Then both at once.

For Gomez, changing genres is not confusion. It is freedom.

He grew up hearing too much music to pretend only one kind belongs to him.

That same philosophy carries into his songwriting.

“Not every song is about me, but every song is about me.”

Some songs begin with somebody else’s story. Somebody else’s heartbreak. Somebody else’s mistake. But Gomez looks backward through his own life until he finds the emotional bridge that lets him stand inside that person’s experience.

Then he writes from there.

There is no filler simply because two words happen to rhyme.

The words stay because something behind them was lived, experienced, cried over, loved, lost or felt somewhere deeper than ordinary conversation can reach.

Music gives Christopher Gomez permission to say the things Christopher Gomez might never casually say sitting across a table.

That refusal to manufacture emotion extends to the way he views the music business itself. His years in radio left him with a quality-control mentality. He does not believe showing up should automatically earn applause.

He does not make music for participation ribbons.

The standard is not perfection. He will be the first to say the records are not perfect. The standard is intention.

Put in the hours. Lose sleep over it. Rewrite it. Rec

That is the idea behind the apparel:

wear the record without printing the record cover on your chest.

Music becomes visual art. Visual art becomes clothing. Clothing leads someone back to the song.

One frequency feeds the next.

And at this stage of his life, Gomez is not interested in proving himself to anybody.

He is interested in leaving something behind.

Songs that remain useful after the moment that created them has passed. Lyrics somebody can find years later while walking through their own version of a road he once traveled. Maybe they hear the right line at the right time and realize somebody else has already stood there.

Maybe that makes the road feel a little less lonely.

Five years from now, Gomez is careful about predicting exactly where all of this leads. Some dreams, he believes, work better when they remain private conversations between a man, his faith and the universe.

A few awards would be nice.

A chart would be nice.

Radio finally showing some love would certainly be nice.

And if things go right, perhaps ChrisFM becomes known not merely as a Houston artist, but as a national or international artist from Houston.

But there is something he hopes success never touches.

The writing.

Five years from now, twenty years from now, whatever frequency ChrisFM happens to be broadcasting on, Christopher Gomez still wants the words to come from the purest emotion he can find.

Because eventually every transmission ends.

The feeling is what survives.

Music. Art. Apparel. One Frequency.