They told Fences to go to rehab; he said yes, yes, yes.

If Fences' Chris Mansfield doesn't have a record deal by the time you recycle this newspaper—or refresh this page or whatever—then something is seriously wrong with the music business (I know, news flash). The 26-year-old singer-songwriter has pretty much everything going for him: classical training, crucial industry connections, and most importantly, a finished first album just begging for the right label to release it. He has just enough going against him, as well: a slightly troubled but more or less taken-care-of past, wall-to-wall tattoos, a brooding demeanor—he could be the kind of damaged, bad-for-you heartthrob that the Northwest hasn't convincingly produced since Elliott Smith (or at the very least Art Alexakis).

[...] "When I first moved here, I just felt so creative," he says. "I was banging songs out. I have probably 50 to 100 songs that no one's heard yet. I'll play some of them live, but I probably have a couple more records already lined up and ready to go. I just still feel so fucking full of music right now."

But it was also a period of depressive drinking, which Mansfield talks about with an evasiveness that suggests he either wants to forget those benders or else really has trouble remembering them. "I guess I was doing whatever you could think of, just normal drunk bullshit, the shit that we all do when we're wasted," he says. "I haven't fallen off a stage or punched Eddie Vedder in the face or done anything wild like that."

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