Cool Chris finds his voice with a global audience

Limerick’s Chris Kirby has found his musical voice as ‘Cool Chris’, joining Handyman Hal and reaching a global audience

Thomondgate native, Chris Kirby, has found his voice with a global audience, writing music for Handyman Hal as Cool Chris

Limerick’s Chris Kirby has found an unexpected global audience as “Cool Chris” through his work with the hugely popular Handyman Hal children’s Youtube channel, which has received more than 1 billion views.

Chris lends his song-writing skills to the channel to provide family-friendly educational songs focused on construction, lawn care, tractors, tools, rescue vehicles, and problem-solving, on a channel that encourages children to have fun while they learn how things work.

The Thomondgate native’s partnership with Handyman Hal came about after a chance encounter through a bespoke songwriting website, where Chris had been plying his trade writing personalised songs for clients. It was there that he first crossed paths with Jason Wheeler (Handyman Hal) who had seen the website on an episode of Shark Tank – The USA’s version of Dragon’s Den.

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At the time Jason reached out, the Handyman Hal YouTube channel already had between 250,000 and 300,000 subscribers.

Chris told I Love Limerick he stood out on the website, which is a vast “field of artists”, and started producing songs for Jason, he said, “He sees this fella with a moustache, and he thinks to himself, ‘That fella looks fun’. So he hires me based on a photograph, and I wrote a song about lawn care: taking care of the lawn, cutting the grass, blowing the leaves, and moving the mulch. All this stuff was not native to me, I had to go away and Google all these things to try and make a song out of it. So he hired me through the website and he was so impressed, we did that a couple of times.”

Not all the subjects were alien to Chris as he explained he was once a school bus driver in Limerick City, a subject which came to use during his Handyman Hal career, saying jokingly, “The circle was complete, I’d gone from driving the thing to writing a song about the thing.”

When Chris decided to move away from the songwriting website, Jason, so impressed with the partnership they had formed, tracked Chris down to produce one-off songs before Chris approached him to ask if he wanted to make the partnership official, as the songs had been receiving great feedback and lots of views online.

The journey has helped Chris rediscover the joy of music; he believes children connect honestly with songs, without preconceptions of what is “cool”. He told I Love Limerick, “I just love writing songs for humans that people call ‘kids’, but they are people, too! People who just enjoy rocking out and having fun, too. I kind of found who I am in this process; having fun writing music that I think is seen as ‘cheesy’ or ‘not cool,’ but there’s an audience out there that tells me it is. And that’s kids!”

Chris noted he can now draw on the influences he once hid, saying he had an affinity toward pop music growing up, pointing to bands such as Boyzone and Westlife, saying he felt like he couldn’t let those influence influence his style when he played with bands growing up, noting, “It wasn’t ‘cool’, so I was putting myself away so people would like me. I firmly believe you will make yourself sick doing that. If you live a life for somebody else to just fit in. Personally, it’s not worth it to me. So, the more I leaned in to who I was, the better my life became.”

For two-and-a-half to three years, Chris had been working in the background writing and producing music for Handyman Hal, until he paid a visit to his boss at Awesome Con, a free event last year for the fan base. Meeting  Handyman Hal and Awesome Alex in person for the first time, their chemistry was just so natural together, and it made sense to transition Chris to the on-screen team, so “Cool Chris” was made official. And the character has been growing ever since. 

Chris is preparing for an upcoming American Tour with Handyman Hal and Awesome Alex, saying, “The tour kicks off on the 9th of April, in Houston, Texas. This has been the dream since I first got a guitar in my hand when I was 14. I’m now 37! To quote John Cena, ‘Never give up!'”

If he had some advice to his younger self, he would say, “Just be yourself. Don’t be afraid to be yourself. The confidence I took away from myself because I kept myself so small, because I wanted to be liked, or I wanted to be around people who didn’t want to see the real me. I would say, ‘Just strut, baby!’ The people who love you for who you are, they’ll stick around!”

Chris ‘Cool Chris’ Kirby is a singer/songwriter and producer from Limerick, Ireland, with over twenty years of experience onstage and in-studio. He’s a jack of all musical trades, from playing live in local bands to writing bespoke commercial songs and writing and producing podcasts. Before joining the Handyman Hal team, Kirby built a substantial portfolio as a songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, producer, and custom-music creator. His longstanding career now converges with a global children’s entertainment brand, a development that places him among a growing number of Irish creatives influencing international family media.