About Chris

I suppose I could write my bio in the third person and make it seem really fancy but I’d much rather admit I’m writing it, so first person it is.

I was born and raised in New Jersey, in what is either the most southern part of Central Jersey or the most northern part of South Jersey.

For Xmas 1985, my parents gave me the cassette of Born In The USA by Bruce Springsteen, and that’s when I decide I wanted to sing and play guitar. It took a little while for this to actually start happening but at 16, I bought my first guitar and set my sights on playing in a rock band.

After years of playing in many bands that went nowhere, in 2006, I moved to Los Angeles to attend Musicians Institute in Hollywood, and graduated from the GIT program in 2008. I moved back home to Jersey shortly after.

In 2010, a few friends and I took a chance of launching our very own podcast, back before literally everyone was doing them. Being the humble lads we were, we named it The Only Podcast That Matters. It was a (mostly) weekly show where we’d talk about whatever was happening in our lives and the world that particular week, aiming for the feel of getting a booth at a restaurant with a bunch of friends and catching up. It was real talk, and real funny. We stuck with it until the end of 2014, stopping at 200 episodes.

In late 2012, I fully put my music ambitions to the side and moved back to Los Angeles to Kickstart my voice acting/voice over career, but we’d bank some TOPTM episodes when I visited home to give me a continued presence on the show. Feeling like I was getting rusty after a few months of not being on mic, on April 1, 2013, I launched Chris Aballo’s Podcast Experiment (CAPE) with the intention of keeping myself sharp so I’d be that much better when I flew home and did “the real show.” After TOPTM briefly packed it in, I began doing CAPE weekly at Skidrow Studios in downtown Los Angeles at the start of 2015. I was spending one hour of every Monday hosting a livestream with a variety of friends and guests, and it was more fun than I’d had in a long time. Sadly, Skidrow Studios closed in October 2015 and I kept CAPE going from home. However, once I hit 100 episodes in August 2016, I quietly took am open-ended hiatus from the show since I didn’t know what and how the show would be at that time.

After being insprired by my experiences with CAPE, The Only Podcast That Matters reunited at the end of 2015 and recorded The Guide To Life limited series, released during the summer of 2016. We also did another run of 16 episodes in 2017 but we couldn’t seem to get it together beyond that. By the end of 2018, I’d had enough of life in Los Angeles and moved back to Jersey once again.

Fast forward to 2020 and the pandemic. We were told this quarantine would last for two weeks. I figured it would be more like two months, so knowing my brain would eat itself with nothing to do and nowhere to go, I decided to relaunch CAPE on the first day of quarantine (March 16, 2020). My guests were mostly virtual and eventually all on Zoom since that’s how we talked to other people in 2020. Thanks to dumb luck (and Instagram), I stumbled upon A Shared Universe PodcaStudio in Eatontown, NJ in September 2020 and booked an appointment to check it out. There was a mutual love-fest between myself and my crew and the Shared Universe studio team and we’ve been doing CAPE with them ever since. The show continues to grow and expand, and it’s one of the most creatively fulfilling projects I’ve ever done.

I’m more than a decade into my voice acting career as well, lending my dulcet tones to projects as varied as commercials, films, and exhibits. I still play guitar but mostly for myself, but you never know.

So that’s it. If you want to know more about me, be sure check out CAPE and follow me on Twitter, Instagram and TikTok.