Big Winner is the new musical project from Charles Griffin Gibson, an American filmmaker and musician based in Oslo, Norway. Previously releasing music as Chuck, Gibson worked with cult label Audio Antihero (home to Frog). After leaving New York City, taking a musical hiatus, and becoming a father, it felt natural to start fresh as Big Winner.

An artist who once made anxious songs about dating and heavy drinking in NYC is now writing reflective songs exploring the private emotional complexities of parenthood and growing older. Big Winner’s debut album, Dinosaur, arrives November 13.

“I’m Chuck, an American filmmaker and musician based in Oslo. I used to live in Brooklyn and release music as CHUCK. Now I make music as Big Winner, and my debut album is Dinosaur. In 2019, I was in the process of moving from New York City to Norway with my wife, and I decided it was the right time to stop making music. For me, songwriting is a compulsive behaviour that requires a lot of emotional, mental, and logistical resources. At the time, giving those resources to music didn’t feel healthy anymore. I sold all my equipment before leaving behind the Big Apple and the social anxieties of my 20s.

Five years later, I found myself integrated into Scandinavian society with two kids and zero swag. I was an alien in a strange land, cleaning what felt like an endless conveyor belt of oatmeal-stained dirty dishes. I stood at the sink, exhausted, getting lost in thoughts of secret fantasies, lingering regrets, and reflections on my own childhood, which felt like it happened on another planet - back home in the US, a country I still felt deep in my bones, although, as I squinted at it across the Atlantic, I couldn’t really recognize it anymore.

One day, I bought a cheap classical guitar from someone in my neighborhood, and before I knew it, new songs started coming. Compulsions die hard. It wasn’t long before I was Big Winner, and I had to start recording the tracks.

But I didn’t want to let music take over my life again. So instead of buying a bunch of new gear, I decided to set a limitation on myself: the only physical instruments I was allowed to use on this record were the cheap classical guitar and an egg shaker I got from a Norwegian pop star. To complete the puzzle, I also used MIDI instruments, freelance musicians from Fiverr, and tons of Creative Commons sound effects I found online.

The title of this record comes from my son’s endearing obsession with dinosaurs, as well as my own feeling of slowly going extinct. Dinosaur is ultimately a record about ping-ponging back and forth between many contradictory feelings — the joy I feel when I’m playing with my kids, the way their eyeballs on me make me hate my bad habits, the hazy nostalgia of remembering my youth back in America, and the creeping realization that my (our?) time is running out.”

Nothing Matters to Chuck Now

Chuck is the music of Charles Griffin Gibson, an award-winning East Coast-raised American filmmaker living and working in Oslo, Norway. By day he edits documentary films, by night he writes and self-records DIY singer-songwriter oddities. He debuted with the Frog-produced Let’s Make Out EP before debuting for Audio Antihero (Frog / Magana / Nosferatu D2 / Cloud) with the My Band Is A Computer career retrospective. His last album was 2017’s Frankenstein Songs for the Grocery Store, but in 2024 Chuck has begun to hear the call of the unreleased and obscure songs in his catalogue. The bitter and breezy indie pop of ‘Nothing Matters to Me Now’ is the first in a series of releases.

Chuck says of the new release, “I had a demo of the competing-synth-melody chorus for maybe five years before I was able to actually build the whole song out. And it's been another five years since I did that, so now when I hear it it's like I'm listening to someone else's music. From a production standpoint there's probably too many elements in the mix, but damn I still love that chorus and am glad I hung on to it. It's simultaneously sad, manic, stupid, and fun. It's exploding and overwhelming you musically while the singer mutters something hopeless to himself. I love the contrast there. I think the lyrics were a reaction to the 2016 US presidential election, but I read them now as more of a self-hate letter to the worst sides of myself.  This is one of many unreleased songs I'm compiling in a new Chuck release later this year with the lovely, patient and passionate Jamie at Audio Antihero.”