



Our friend Chad Lewine AKA Honeychrome sat down with actor/singer/songwriter Creed Bratton, of The Office and The Grass Roots fame, before a solo performance at Highline Ballroom. We're here to let you in on a few of the life lessons he shared with Chad.





How does your acting influence your music, and vice versa?





Creed: I did this film called Terri that went to Sundance and I played a really fragile old man. I’d get in character every day for that guy. We worked on it for about a month. The first time I picked up my guitar when I had a chance - well actually I jammed with John C Reilly before then - but when I started writing again, I found that I had a different perspective on a couple of songs. Then, if I’m playing and writing songs, that will also correlate to the acting. They’re both emotional, they’re both taking a lyric or a line, presenting it in an emotional context to either a camera or to an audience. When you raise the bar in one art form, the other one comes right along with it… People always say ‘Well you’re jack of all trades, master of none. You’re doing both of these things so they’re going to weaken and I say not the case at all! Been doing this since I was, well, thirteen. Professionally, started at seventeen. It’s something I’ve always done.





That’s where it’s at! Confidence in your craft.





Confidence in your craft? Confidence in yourself and your craft. Never let anybody shake you out of that. I recall when I first started out and came to LA from Europe, I’d been playing with this folk trio for a while, and my future wife’s sister - we were sitting at a restaurant - she said "What’s going on Creed?" I said well, I see myself having success in this and then moving on to acting and she starts telling me all the percentages of why this wouldn’t happen, I just looked at her and all of a sudden she just faded, I just took a white brush and just washed her face out. She kept going blah blah blah blah, but I don’t want to listen to that. Everybody is a naysayer. It’s fear. They don’t want to do it so how dare you have the balls to go out and try it yourself. I didn’t have a B plan. That was it. I was doing that... that’s all I really knew how to do. That was it.





Creed comically chats with his manager on the earpiece





You didn’t know how or when or where, but you knew you would make it?





Yeah. Yeah. I saw. I had an inner vision.





Was it easy for you to carry that same mentality to your career, five to ten years from then and your career now?





Think about this, we’re 30 years from The Grass Roots to The Office. From working as a prop man, a boom man, as a caterer, construction work, I was doing every single possible thing I could do, be a guard, to stay alive and still stay in class and keep putting up a scene every week. Of course you have doubt, that’s only human. But when push comes to shove, you go: NO! and you throw all the dross off of you and you proceed straight ahead. It’s so hard - you can get sidetracked so easy in this business and I don’t even know about thick skin – I don’t think I have thick skin – I get hurt real easy when people criticize me. I’ll act like it doesn’t bother me, and if it does, I have to go through this… a friend of mine- she’s very knowledgeable in these areas, she said ‘These thoughts that come into your mind that are negative, that’s all they are. Thoughts. They do not harm you.’ So now I have this little mail slot in the back of my head that when they come in like this, I just let them come right in the brain, then the slot opens up and the thought goes out and leaves in the wind. It blows away in the breeze, and I go “phew”... Thoughts come in, then they turn to leaves and they blow away. You know the movie, Frank Herbert’s DUNE? Bene Gesserit’s litany against Fear. I must not fear. Fear is the mind killer. I will face my fear I will allow it to pass through me and over me and when fear has passed, I will turn my inner eye to its path and where fear has gone, there will be nothing.







Creed serenades the crowd





Your birth name is William Charles Snyder, how did you come to the name Creed Bratton?





My father died when I was two, so I didn’t really know him. He died in The War. My mother had mental and emotional problems like that, so I was basically abandoned as a child. Stayed with a great grandmother whom I’d never met and some other family members that I had never met before. So that instilled in me the creative thing – because you have to fight all this stuff over the years, there’s no security, -





You make your own answers up?





You make your own answers. You have no one to give you anything, no one tells you this is what you do, here’s where you’re going to college, this is what you do, this is how I did it and I had nothing like that. I didn’t pick it up. Not only that, my mother remarried this Sam---- , who had like a third grade education, he was an alcoholic, all that – and I took his name on – Chuck Ertmoed – so I never had any self-esteem. I had really low self-esteem. I thought that was my name, but I wasn’t even legally adopted. So I’m in Europe, in Greece, and I meet this couple who were from Oregon, they were going to Crete to teach English to the Cretans. I told them of my vision that I was going to become an actor and that I am a musician and this is the plan and this had to be, they said “Well which name will you use when you do that?” and I said Chuck Ertmoed. I said I know it’s a horrible thing. Cut to the next morning after a night of ouzo and anisette, anything with licorice in it, the Greeks just love that licorice stuff. It’s really strong. It’s sickly stuff. (laughs) The next morning I look over on the floor by my rucksack is this tablecloth and I realize from the night before, it’s all these names that the couple and I came up with. They’re all crossed out and one is circled - it’s Creed Bratton. I vaguely remember going “Yeahhhhh. That’s the one” and so that’s it! I forgot about it ‘til I signed the contract for Dunhill Records with The Grassroots. I was gonna sign Chuck Ertmoed or William Charles Snyder, probably would have signed Chuck Ertmoed, but I went *BING* Lightbulb, Creed Bratton. They’re all going ‘Who the hell, what’s this?’ But that’s never changed! Legally and everything. That’s it.





What do you do to keep yourself balanced and grounded in the midst of touring and filming when you have both or a lot going on? What do you do to calm yourself, to keep focused?





I think a lot of professionals do what I do, I exercise, do a lot of yoga, meditate and am very very conscious of what I put in my body. I think food, a light amount of food, keeping really healthy. And keeping a positive attitude. And I read. Right now I’m reading Cryptonomicon by Neil Stephenson. And I just finished the new book by David Mitchell – Slatehouse. I love Snowcrash. I like Sci Fi.









One more, you have traveled quite a bit as a musician. Are there any strange or unexpected places in the world that have unusually rabid or obsessed fans?





In Scranton of course! I played with the Scrantones and all of The Office cast were there, Steve Carell showed up. We had a parade with police escort and stuff. That was the second time. But the time before, Angela, Oscar and I were taking a walk outside of the hotel in Scranton and we hear this car slam on their brakes, the car stops in the middle of the road and all these other cars around them, and they start getting out of the car and start charging over to us like we were The Beatles! I walk around NYC and people say hi and take a picture, I don’t get bothered by it. I’m not gonna let that mess up my life, you know? Can you imagine if you’re a Tom Cruise or Brad Pitt? You can’t go out. Creed can go out.



