Speaking from a Tulsa, Oklahoma, hotel room on a day off from DJing for Paul McCartney on his recent Got Back tour, Chris Holmes, AB’94, flashed a wrist tattoo reading “FLOW” in thick black letters. It’s a mantra of sorts, and one that explains—as well as anything might—Holmes’s twisty-turny career path. Armed with encyclopedic musical knowledge and a gift for collaboration, Holmes has forged a fame-adjacent body of work as songwriter, bandleader, record producer, filmmaker, augmented reality artist, DJ for the stars, and multimedia showman. “Basically, my brain is always at, like, 11,” Holmes says cheerfully on a video call. “My life has been a series of hyperfocused events and projects that have all kind of accumulated and led to where I’m at now.”

Raised in Lake Forest, Illinois, Holmes started playing guitar and synthesizers in seventh grade. By high school his fascination with Philip Glass, AB’56, pointed him to Hyde Park. “I’ll go and I’ll study classical minimalism and I’ll become a composer,” Holmes remembers thinking. That didn’t pan out. Instead he branched out. Holmes was a projectionist at Doc Films. He served as a program director at WHPK, where he hosted a show about UFOs. He wrote papers about alien sightings for his mentor, the late Divinity School professor Jonathan Z. Smith, and interviewed members of the Heaven’s Gate cult. He mingled with scrappy alt-rockers like Liz Phair, who borrowed Holmes’s nickname for the then male-dominated Wicker Park neighborhood in the title of her now-iconic album Exile in Guyville. He even landed a short-lived major label record deal for his band Yum-Yum.

Dan Loves Patti, Yum-Yum’s 1996 album recorded in Holmes’s bedroom, earned praise for its cleverly subversive pop sensibility. But the group, which sometimes performed in pink bunny suits, fizzled commercially. When Yum-Yum’s record label folded, Holmes took stock. He had planned to spend a year after college playing music before going to grad school. But “every year I’d go out and do something, and then there’d be a more interesting thing to do next.”

Those interesting things included collaborations with Sinéad O’Connor, a keyboard-playing gig with the Smashing Pumpkins, and a deep dive into parapsychology at the Remote Viewing Instructional Services—an organization that studies the ability to “see” objects in geographically disparate locations.

In the early 2000s Holmes moved from his Chicago headquarters—“this amazing old mansion on 48th and Kimbark”—to Los Angeles.

There he quickly tapped into LA’s community of creative types, both alternative and mainstream. A simpatico music supervisor on the TV series The O.C. featured a couple of Holmes’s tunes on the show. Partnering with Brian Liesegang, AB’91, on the electronica pop duo Ashtar Command, Holmes performed on and coproduced its American Sunshine album. He cowrote a song with Mandy Moore. And informed by his 3,000-strong record collection, Holmes started spinning records at parties. He ended up DJing for Radiohead and eventually befriended the band’s producer Nigel Godrich.

In 2009 Holmes and Godrich hosted a Grammy Night party at a rented house in the Hollywood Hills. Godrich had produced Paul McCartney’s album Chaos and Creation in the Backyard, “and Paul came to the party and danced in front of the DJ booth all night,” Holmes remembers. “I dropped a remix that I’d made of ‘Paperback Writer’ and Paul loved it. And then I talked to him after the sets were over … he’s the most charming person and the least disappointing celebrity conversation of all time.”

Very soon after, Holmes was invited to open for McCartney at Coachella in front of 60,000 festivalgoers. In 2011 Holmes began warming up the ex-Beatle’s concert crowds on tour. Fifteen years later, Holmes, typically dressed in a cream suit as he grooves behind a cockpit-like console, continues to precede McCartney’s performances with ingenious Beatles remixes.

When not on the road, Holmes has spent much of the past few years producing a Netflix documentary about the New Wave band Devo, of “Whip It” fame. He’s also working on another passion project, The Psychedelic Mixtape: The Visionary Experience—mixed-media head trips for the masses. Audiences lean back in theater seating to experience projections of candy-colored lights pulsating amoeba-like in sync with throbbing music, all choreographed by Holmes for maximum “blissed-out” effect.

“It’s the same kind of technology that they have in the Sphere in Vegas, but it’s an insane resolution—it’s 12K resolution,” Holmes explains. Alongside the music, listeners hear voice recordings of Aldous Huxley, Joseph Campbell, Ram Dass, and Timothy Leary.

Holmes lives in suburban Los Angeles with his wife, Melinda Lee Holm, a writer and Tarot reader. From his Woodland Hills home base, he’s busily merging a lifetime of multidirectional obsessions into a singular career path. “All these random rabbit holes that I’d been down … ended up being the exact skills that I needed,” he says. Now he’s able to do what he’s always wanted, “which is help transport people from a place of stress and anxiety to a place of joy and wonder.”