In March, he recorded with Grammy-winning producer Mitch Dane at his Sputnik Sound studio in Nashville. The solo artist released his first three singles this summer: “Summertime,” “Happy Breakup Song,” and “Waiting.”

All three singles are now available on Spotify and iTunes.

Born and raised in Alpena, Wiser, 52, has always enjoyed music.

“I was as active as I could be in the music community in Alpena during my time there,” Wiser recalled. “I was in the high school vocal ensemble, all the way through high school.”

Chris Wiser released three singles this summer, one of which is called “Happy Breakup Song,” represented by the photo here.

He graduated from Alpena High School in 1987.

He was in a band in Alpena called Nightwing in the late ’80s. His brother Jeff Wiser played bass guitar in Nightwing. Some of his cousins were also in that band.

“Probably the most important and influential, my dad was a musician — a singer and a guitar player­ — in the ’60s. And he got me started in playing guitar and singing at a very, very young age.”

Wiser said his dad, Phil Wiser, still has reel-to-reel tapes of Chris singing when he was just 3 years old.

“It’s adorable,” Wiser said. “It sounds very much like a chipmunk singing.”

His dad got Wiser his first guitar when he was 6 years old, so he has been playing since then.

If YouTube had been around back then, young Wiser might have gotten more than a few views.

“We had cassettes and we had (record) albums,” Wiser said. “I wore out cassette decks with the rewind, fast-forward, all that stuff. It was a lot of fun, though.”

His parents, Phil and Suzanne, still live in Alpena, he said.

Two years ago, Wiser moved to Toledo, Ohio, for a job opportunity. Prior to that, he lived in Grand Haven for 20 years.

“It was really difficult to leave,” Wiser said. “Great music community, beautiful town, very supportive people, and just a wealth of amazing musicians there.”

He played in Grand Haven three to five nights per week, accumulating thousands of hours onstage.

“That’s where I learned how to put on a show and keep people entertained,” Wiser said. “You learn really quickly, you’re there for them and they’re not there for you … It’s a good perspective to have, to keep that humility.”

Wiser has been writing songs since he was 10.

“You write about what you know,” he said, adding that as a kid, those songs were “about your dog and hanging out at the lake, those types of things.”

But he kept at it through high school and college at Michigan State University, where he was in a couple of bands.

After he graduated, he joined a band called Soul Syndicate out of Grand Rapids.

“We opened for Bad Company at Wings Stadium in Kalamazoo,” Wiser said. “We played frequently with a group called The Verve Pipe. We had some great opportunities to play with some of the large groups.”

Wiser explained that while he had a lot of live performances under his belt, he had not gotten many recording opportunities until earlier this year.

In December 2020, he was watching a documentary called “Recording in Progress,” and one of the producers and mixers they interviewed was Vance Powell, who has a studio with his partner, Mitch Dane, called Sputnik Sound.

Powell has recorded with Chris Stapleton and Jack White from The White Stripes, to name a few.

“On a whim, I emailed Vance,” Wiser said. “And, candidly, I didn’t expect to hear back from him, because he’s a Grammy-award-winning producer. But he, surprisingly, and, to his credit ­– he’s a great guy — wrote right back to me.”

Then Powell introduced Wiser to Dane, whom he was able to record with in March.

“It was a leap of faith, but an opportunity of a lifetime,” Wiser said.

He describes his music as “acoustic soul.”

To learn more, visit Wiser’s website at chriswisermusic.com.

“While sharpening his live performances with thousands of hours on stage, Chris has developed a unique voice and songwriting style that is a blend of Americana/soul/blues-rock. You can hear his multi-genre influences in his writing, but there is a consistent familiarity, pop sensibility, and edgy soulfulness in his voice that resonates through his songs,” his website explains.

When he’s not writing, singing or playing music, Wiser is working in human resources.

“I think that music is the way I’ve kept my sanity in the course of a long HR career, because it’s stressful, meticulous, it’s important, but it’s kind of the very opposite of being a musician,” he said.

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