Growing up in a small town in Iowa, Christopher The Conquered did not have access to the steady stream of information, namely TV, that most kids take for granted.

"I guess [my parents] didn't want us muddied by the world of consumerism, so we just watched VHS tapes all the time, and we had a very full Disney movie collection," Christopher explains over the phone from Naples, Italy, during a recent European tour. He releases his debut album "I'm Giving Up On Rock And Roll" today. "We watched all the Disney musicals like 'Aladdin' and 'Oliver and Company' and 'Jungle Book.' That was my main influence. So basically somewhere between Charlie Parker and be-bop and 'Mary Poppins' was my upbringing.

Christopher chatted with us about the intimate nature of the new album, the various versions of the record - including personal songs written for individual fans that pre-ordered - and how Ryan Adams provided his career a boost with this tweets.

You said "this album isn't for me." What do you mean by that?

I wrote the songs very much for myself. We each have our own inner conflicts, but the album is about the idea that every person is complicated and has many facets to their personality and you don't see all of that, but that's what the person deals with every day, and coming to terms with that and all of the aspects of your personality is a lifelong journey. The songs that I wrote that made it to this album are all rooted in that theme of looking at all the different parts of yourself, but then the way we made the album was to make it so that it could connect with people and hopefully be more universal without sullying the original inspirations of the song.

So that affected the production, the instrumentation, the way we arranged the songs. We really tried to make the songs concise. There's no fluff. In earlier stuff that I'd do, I'd try to satisfy myself with artistic tangents as they say and experimental things and whatnot, which are great, especially for music nerds and people who like digging into that kind of stuff. For me the album isn't about any of that kind of stuff. It's about the message of asking people to be honest with themselves and understanding themselves, because I think if you understand yourself you can be confident, you can be at peace, and if each person could be at peace then the world would be a much better place.

Tell me about your upbringing and your early musical experiences

I started out really with my parents. My dad's a musician, he plays guitar, not professionally, but for me he was the most important influence. He introduced me to jazz music, and when I was young he would take me down to Kansas City to see jazz concerts.

How do you feel you have changed as a musician and songwriter?

I think I've become much more of a sincere writer about my own personality. I've always expressed my opinions in my songs, but my songs used to be more about my opinions on other things; maybe political issues or other people. My songwriting has become a lot more personal and about myself. There's this ugly part of myself, and I feel inspired to share things that are maybe wrong with me or maybe I can improve on and put those into songs.

There are several different versions of the album, with bonus tracks, a cassette version, a photo book and even you composing a song for the first 350 preorders.

In the period of say 2011 to 2013, I wrote and demoed about 40 new songs and then shared with my producer and best friend, Patrick Tape Fleming, who helped me find that theme that I just described to you. We actually recorded 14 songs, but when we got done with all of them, we thought about getting down to that core message but I wanted to share the others songs in one way or another. So that's why there's bonus tracks, because they were recorded as the part of the attempt to make this record, and I guess for me, it's an incentive for people to sit for a while with the vinyl which is more of a commitment to listening to it seriously, in my opinion.

Regarding the writing the tracks for people, this is just something I wanted to do to engage really intimately with people that are supporting me and also just to take on as a challenge and drive me to write more, to write every day. The deluxe addition, as a fan, that is everything that I'd want the album to include. 

How are you going about writing the specific songs for the fans?

Once I get back from Europe, there's going to be an email that will go out to the preorders. The songs aren't going to be personal in that they're going to be driven by who it is, per se. I want to write songs that could also stand alone as songs. I'm going to be asking everyone to share their single greatest joy and their single greatest regret in their life, and I'm going to write a song for each person based on their answers.

What impact did Ryan Adams' comments about your music have on your career?

I was having lunch with my grandma, and I just got some texts from friends that were like, "Yo man, Ryan Adams just tweeted about you, you should look at it." My reaction was like not really anything. At first I just felt like, that's a thing, that's cool, that's kinda weird. I remember not feeling particularly like, who, that's so cool or anything like that. It's Twitter or Instagram, it's not on the front of the New York Times or anything, but I was like, that's really cool that he even got a hold of the album and listened to it and thought it was cool. Ten minutes later I was like, wow, actually I think that is really kind of a big deal (laughs). It was kind of hard to process because it was really unexpected. It sort of became a bigger thing. I self-manage a lot of aspects of my own career so I thought it would be interesting to track the impact of that sort of thing, will it actually matter in terms of merch sales and Twitter followers and YouTube views. I had never posted anything on Reddit, but my brother is a Redditor and he told me I should, so I did, and it went to the front page of Reddit within an hour and millions of people saw it, and that's when it kind of became a bigger deal, because as cool as it is when any respected musician gives you a shout out, it's a lot more helpful if people actually know that he did it (laughs).

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