The duo Chester French, whose name honors Daniel Chester French—the sculptor behind the Lincoln Memorial—pairs Los Angeles-based vocalist/songwriter D.A. Wallach with multi-instrumentalist/songwriter Maxwell Drummey, originally rooted in Boston. Their sound fuses timeless songwriting and power-pop melodies with synth-pop and rap-inflected production. Drummey began formal training at age three on classical piano, progressed to jazz guitar, and later concentrated on jazz and classical composition while still in high school. Wallach, born in Milwaukee, WI, first experimented with comedy, politics, magic, and drumming before committing to vocals as a teenager. The pair crossed paths in 2003 during their freshman year at Harvard, where they performed with an initial five-piece lineup of Chester French in neighborhood bars. After prevailing in a battle of the bands, they tracked their debut EP, Chester French's First Love, across two days at the university’s Quad Sound Studios. Captivated by the process, Wallach and Drummey assumed engineering duties at the same facility, offsetting costs for their own recordings by working on projects for other artists while finishing their degrees and shaping a full-length debut. They finalized Love the Future in spring 2007, the same term they graduated from Harvard. The resulting tracks drew interest from Kanye West and Jimmy Iovine, among others, yet Pharrell of the Neptunes ultimately signed Chester French to his Star Trak imprint, which issued the She Loves Everybody EP late in 2008.
