Chris Kroeze discusses his music career and calling Northwest Wisconsin home

Jan. 19—CHETEK — Music has been in Barron native Chris Kroeze's life for as long as he can remember. His dad would regularly play the guitar around the campfire when he was young, and his interest was piqued.

"There was always a guitar in the corner of our basement and, being 2- or 3-year-olds, we weren't supposed to touch it, so we'd always run over there and touch the strings and do whatever we could," Kroeze recalled to the Leader-Telegram in a recent interview inside his home studio, which he built himself at the height of the pandemic, on his rural Chetek property.

Seeing his interest, his parents gifted him a guitar for his 6th birthday. He learned a couple of chords and figured it out from there. A few years later, when he was 13, he found himself at a karaoke night at the VFW in Barron, where he performed a few songs.

"The people liked it and I got a big rush from it. I was like, 'Oh yeah, this is what I want to do,'" he said. Kroeze realized his dream of being a career musician.

Humble beginnings

What is the first step to making a career out of music in small-town Wisconsin?

Kroeze did what many great musicians before him did and started a band the summer before he began high school. The band, called Sweet Action, performed at The Variety Show — Kroeze's high school's winter talent show — to kickoff its career, and eventually started calling up bars, where Sweet Action would go on to play locally for a couple of years.

"Everyone's talking about getting their driver's license and what kind of job they were going to get. I had zero backup plan," Kroeze said. He was going to play music and figure out a way to make money doing it, he added.

As his high school years were coming to an end, you could find Kroeze performing at a local bar almost every weekend. College took him to Minneapolis to study audio production and engineering, and still he drove back home almost every weekend for a bar gig, making just enough to pay rent in the Twin Cities.

"I graduated, and six months go by, and the student loans kick in," Kroeze recalled.

With bills to pay and not a lot of money, he got a job working with concrete, which, Kroeze admitted, he was terrible at. The job was a good source of money, but also motivation to keep going in his pursuit of a music career.

So, he went to Walmart.

Kicking it into high gear

"I went to Walmart and got one of those big paper calendars ... And I literally just started Googling, 'live music Wisconsin,' and writing down phone numbers of all these bars," Kroeze said, discussing how he got into music again. "I would just go through and call them and if I talked to someone, I'd cross it off."

By the time he was done he had booked some 200 shows for that year, making him a full-time musician.

For eight years Kroeze played all over the Barron and Rice Lake area, as well as the Trempealeau County area, gaining a large local following; so much so that, at one point, he was playing 250-to-275 nights a year.

Feeling burnt out, Kroeze was about ready to hang up the guitar and slow down a bit when a new, and huge, opportunity presented itself — an opportunity he almost didn't take.

"I was playing a show at a tiny little place in New Auburn and I had my phone mounted on my mic stand. I got a call from California and I figured it was a telemarketer, then they left a message," Kroeze said, recalling the moment he first was contacted by NBC about coming on their popular reality singing competition TV show, "The Voice."

The message was from a show producer wanting to talk to him about coming out and being part of the show's blind auditions after he saw a couple videos of Kroeze performing on the internet.

Kroeze's initial thought was, "I don't think I can do that."

Going on "The Voice" requires a contestant to essentially clear their calendar for an entire summer, something Kroeze couldn't really do at the time because he had to perform shows in order to make a living. He said he was living week-to-week sometimes, and the summertime was when his schedule was the fullest.

Despite his concerns, he talked to his wife and family, who encouraged him to do it, saying they would figure out how to make things work.

"I was like 'Okay, here we go,'" Kroeze said

A national stage

Taking the leap of a lifetime, Kroeze found himself standing on "The Voice" stage during his blind audition for season 15, performing Stevie Ray Vaughan's "Pride and Joy," hoping to impress at least one of the four coaches, as well as the national audience watching on TV.

He made an impression on coaches Blake Shelton and Jennifer Hudson, ultimately choosing Shelton as his coach.

"Your singing is electrifying. You can make it into this finale," Shelton told Kroeze during the audition.

He wasn't wrong, as it quickly became clear that not only had he made an impression on the coaches, but also the TV viewers as he made it through weeks of competition and, just as his coach predicted, into the show finale, finishing as the runner-up.

That finale aired just over four years ago on Dec. 18, 2018. Although Kroeze has never watched himself back on the show all the way through before, reflecting on all of it, he said he learned a lot and got some really good advice during his time on the show. However, his biggest learning curve came after "The Voice" was over.

"The Voice" gave Kroeze the opportunity to expand his career beyond Wisconsin, which meant putting out more music to more people than ever before and putting on fully produced shows on larger stages, which is something he had never really done before after playing in the corner of bars for most of his career.

"Once I got off (the show), people are paying money for tickets to come see me play, and they want a show, and it was really hard for me to learn how to actually put a show together," he explained. "That was a long, drawn out learning curve for me, but it's come a long way."

Making it

There is an assumption that in order to "make it big" in the music business, musicians must move to bigger cities such as Nashville or Los Angeles. Kroeze has said from the very beginning that he has no plans to move away from Northwest Wisconsin, which prompts many people to ask: "Don't you want to make it big? How are you going to do that here?"

"I always say, 'Define make it,'" Kroeze said. "Because right now, I play music and make a good living and I'm happy with my life."

Kroeze said another reason — besides the fact there are no Kwik Trips there — for not moving to Nashville is because he's "a dime a dozen" there; meaning there are thousands of people just like him there and he wouldn't stand out nearly as much as he does here in Wisconsin.

He makes plenty of trips there to write and record, but it's not a place he sees himself living and raising his kids, as his whole family is in the Barron area.

"Here (Northwest Wisconsin), I love this as home, because it's just always been that for me," he said.

As far Kroeze is concerned, he is "making it."

Since his time on "The Voice," Kroeze has released some original music that has been well-received by listeners and is often played on country radio stations. His songs have even landed on the Billboard Country Indicator Chart because of the amount of plays and downloads they have received. These hits include "Summer Song" and "Same Ole," among others, off of his latest album "We All Sing Along."

Additionally, Kroeze has gained a large military fan base and often does tours with Armed Forces Entertainment and performs for the troops. He very recently finished a tour in Central and South America, where he performed at a base in the Bahamas to end 2022. He's made more than 10 trips overseas to perform on military bases and is the recipient of the Red Cross Community Hero Award.

"I guess I don't know what people mean when they say 'make it," Kroeze said. "Because man, if this is 'making it,' I'm pretty happy with it."

Looking towards the future, Kroeze wants to keep growing.

"I want to for sure continue to play music and keep making baby steps in the right direction, which is spreading out my following and playing shows in new areas," he said. "I want to just keep things going."