Friday, April 10, the Comey Recital Hall of the Music Arts Center came alive as the indie rock band CHOPT performed their hearts out for their live album performance.
The band’s new album is a project they had been working towards as part of a senior project for band member Jarret Haft ’26. The band planned to record the live performance of their album and release that audio on streaming platforms. The band consists of five upperclassmen at the College: Vocalist and keyboardist Mark Strand ’26, rhythm guitarist and vocalist Jarrett Haft ’26, drummer and vocalist Ian Jenkins ’26, bass guitarist Liam Ellis ’27 and lead guitarist Stone Fisher ’26. The five students are a part of the same fraternity, Kappa Delta Rho, and began their band in the fall of 2025.
Jenkins, Strand and Haft lived in the same house their sophomore year, where they were able to share their passion for music with each other. As Strand expressed it, the “nucleus” of the band formed there. From there, Fisher and Ellis joined the group, and they all began creating original pieces. The band name, CHOPT, is in reference to the slang term chopped, meaning conventionally unattractive.
“I just think that we don’t take ourselves too seriously,” Jenkins said. “And so by calling our band chopped, by calling ourselves chopped, I think it just kind of takes a little bit of pressure, honestly, off of the band.”
The band shared the impact creating the album had on them as a collaborative unit.
“It’s really forced us to trust each other or trust each other’s instincts,” Strand said. “And so, to do that, I think it’s built our trust in each other to make sure that we have a product that we like and we all come to a consensus on.”
Walking into the performance, audience members received a hand-drawn flyer of information for the concert surrounded by unique doodles and jokes. The performance itself consisted of a tracklist with nine original songs, ranging from meaningful pieces about longing to silly tunes about a wombat in a living room.
The members shared the songs that are most meaningful to them.
“I think the song that means most to me is probably ‘Hey You,’” Jenkins said. “I think it’s a very universal experience of seeing someone that you just are so captivated by that you want to go up and say hi to them, but you don’t know how. And you’re trying to hype yourself up, but it’s just, it’s not quite there.”
Fisher, the lead guitarist, recalled his trouble finding the right chords for the song “Wombat,” and how it helped him register the true meaning of the lyrics.
“My favorite song that we play is ‘Wombat,’” Fisher said. “And a lot of the times I get kind of tripped up on the chords. And I was worried about that for so long that I didn’t register what the song was about, and then when I finally read through the lyrics and realized that when we were singing about a wombat in the living room, it just made me smile.”
Strand shared his personal experience that inspired the track “Knock It Down.”
“That song meant a lot to me because it was about this friend that I had whose house got torn down. And his mom came over to my house and she was crying about it. It felt like this really big emotional thing to see this place that I’d hung out with my friend at, and now it was stripped away in just a matter of weeks,” Strand said. “And so, I think it was cool to be able to write a song around it, because I think it felt like I had some kind of therapy from just honoring that place and that home through the process of writing about it.”
The passion each member had for the entire album was evident through their performance. They entered and began with their opening song, “Questions.” They proceeded with an introduction of each of their members and a soulful performance of “I Wish I Could,” which Haft believes is the group’s most compelling and vulnerable track.
“Especially for kids growing up and for boys growing up, it’s a really, really difficult time, figuring out who you want to be and what you want to do, and I think that assurance was something that personally would have helped me all the time knowing I’m going to be okay. And same with the rest of us,” Haft said. “I think that could help a lot of people get through some hard times and know that everything is going to be okay.”
During the closing of “Hey You,” the guitarists drew closer to the sound system, creating feedback and encompassing the theater in the sound of rock and roll. At the end of the live album performance, the audience gave the last song a standing ovation.
Haft noted what the overarching message of the album is.
“Anyone can make music. Doesn’t mean it’s good, including us. And we are chopped and stay chopped,” Haft said.
CHOPT gives special thanks to the William and Mary Music Department; their advisor, Visiting Assistant Teaching Professor of Music Elisse La Barre; Casey O’Neal; Ben Whiting; CHOPT Crew; Kappa Delta Rho; and their loved ones for their support.
If you’re interested in seeing the band play some of their original songs from their latest release, they will be performing next at the Big MAC music festival in the Music Arts Center’s Concert Hall on Sunday, May 10.
