DCist Listening Party: The Oranges Band Are Invisible

What’s the appeal of focusing on that that narrow audience, this very specific time and place? "Gordon's Nightclub"

Roman: Actually it has to do with the Baltimore scene finally getting attention, and not so much attention, sort of about us being around for a long time, and the newer additions to the scene having a very different experience and understanding about what Baltimore is and has been about. It’s kind of disappointing, but I don’t want to judge it or anything.

Dave: Even if what’s happened doesn’t influence what happening now. Like, Peter Quinn in a band called Candy Machine and now has a label called Creative Capitalism. There are people around now that aren’t even aware that Quinn actually broke a big barrier in being a Baltimore band and putting out a record on Dischord, and that’s something people should know about that someone so involved in the scene, someone who is so dedicated to getting those things out and helping this scene keep going. Not knowing about Candy Machine is like someone in D.C. not knowing that Rites of Spring existed.

Roman: The thing about that song is that it’s about a specific conversation I had with somebody. I said something about Candy Machine, she was like “uhh, what?”. I thought, “Really?” That was a different thing. How about Ink? Low Motor? It’s like, hey, no mother fucker, you’ve never heard of Candy Machine?

Pat: That’s a scene I didn’t grow up with and I still know Candy Machine, and I was fifteen.

Roman: When I heard Candy machine, it was “That’s the most original thing I've heard in my life.”

Dave: For you, that was your experience. Roman might not have ever known about bands like Gang of Four and the Fall, and whether you realize if these things are happening or not, it’s relevant and it needs to get out there and be addressed. When kids ask me what this song means? It’s about a club man, a place and time when we were really involved. Somebody’s gotta talk about what it all means. I remember that’s the first place I met you, Memory Lane. I think it was a Brainiac show for that magazine called Ant?

Roman: When you’re talking about history and you’re being inspired by it you risk being dated or not connected with people who weren’t there, this is about such a specific time that few people would relate to. The music and songs are meant to be universally appreciated, but they’re just kinda laced with these references that are pretty obscure and that’s for the audience who will get them. But in general, I hope it just has a general appeal bigger than subject matter, which I think anyone would.

Dave: Funny thing about songs, if you don’t know what its really about, people are gonna draw something different from it. I can think of a Jawbreaker song where its like “machines all breakin’ down” and I had just broken up with this girl and I just wanted it to be “she’s all breaking down”.

Can you talk a little bit more about the Baltimore scene now?

Dave: I mean, Wham City, those are kids that are dedicated to their shit and I respected that.

Well do you feel out of touch with that though?

Roman: Not necessarily. There’s kind of a natural… let’s just say, when we were coming up the scene was very different. Everyone was very involved with each other in the indie scene, everybody knew everybody. Your band could be weird or heavy, lots of styles, but now there’s lots of segmentation and that’s not necessarily the case. It’s bigger, and there’s more potential, but it is hard to be connected. A lot of it’s about saying – things are different. I don’t mean to be judgmental about it, but I do want to point out and say it didn’t necessarily always used to be this way. People can kinda cross the barriers, but I don’t necessarily think that’s gonna happen. I feel relatively in touch with it [the current scene], but I don’t think I should be. I’ve been to Wham City, and it’s just not that comfortable. In an old warehouse filled with kids with a massive line for the bathroom, and music I don’t really like that much. I’m 36 years old now, I’m a different person, and they’re having a different experience. It doesn’t make sense that I’d be totally involved in that – it should be a different experience for them and for me. I shouldn’t experience that in so directly a way.

Dave: Like I said before, if you like something, then immediately whatever else might be weird about your surroundings goes out the door. We could go to a basement show and be just as into it. If my favorite band in the world is playing my least favorite place with 100 people I hate, I’ll still be there. If it’s something worth seeing, you’re going to go for it. When I was out in LA, there was a place called Jabber Jaw, totally gang-ridden, but it’s way worth it to go there and see the Unwound play. You’re just like “Man, I’m doing this and no entity will stop you from getting your fix.” Just one of those things – if it’s worthwhile, fuck it.

Pat: Whatever man, you know you know you’d rather be at the 98 Rock after-party.

Roman: I think what I am missing is something I like. I mean I go to Afrobeat Society and I have a great time and I don’t know that stuff really all that well. And when I see Dan Deacon, it’s awesome, it’s so fucking good, and you don’t have to like the music, he just makes people go ape shit, you just get so involved in the feeling of what he’s doing, and that feeling of community. If it’s not there, you look around and say, “Uh, I don’t know anybody here”.

Dave: Going on tour makes you used to sleeping on weirdos floors and eating whatever. Remember that one night in Toledo with the Detroit Cobras? One of the most ridiculous things I’ve ever seen, it was late and we were trying to sleep on the floor with the after party while it was going on, it was miserable but that’s why it’s there. We were on tour and we know that’s how it is. It’s kinda like going to Wham City.

Can you all talk a little about how this recording process was different? What happened to the song “Jenny, I’m Sneaking Out”? I liked that one a lot.

Roman: Everything got separated from our last big tour with people leaving the band. After tour it was me and Dave, with “Jenny” and a few other songs designed to go into next record, it was time to re-evaluate everything that had come before. This was the very end of 2006. So there was this reorganization at the beginning of 2006, things started over. That’s when we started this, even though some of the songs existed before that. But really, we had like two songs. We were writing, we didn’t have shit. That’s when we got Pat into the group.

Pat: You gave me a three song demo.

Roman: Yeah, it had “Memory Lane” and “Jenny”. We had those couple things to start with. And the whole process was gonna be different. Different band, different motivation, different goal. Everything was different at that point. We were playing a lot of shows, we did the Lemonheads and Spoon shows, a few college shows, and a bunch of early things going on in 2007, which we spent playing and learning new songs. Just sort of re-establishing our persons at home and in our lives.

Pat: I know being in the band normalized my life.

Roman: Yeah, exactly. So the second half of 2007 was really nailing down our songs, getting comfortable, just getting them down. That’s when I wrote to Doug [Gillard]. Throughout the year we knew we wanted to have another guitar player, but no one automatically filled the bill. Our friend Jim was playing with us – that’s him doing vocals on “Ottobar Afterhours” – we were operating as three piece but wanted a fourth person. I knew I didn’t want to lay down lead over stuff we had done; I don’t want to do that, I want to get a guitar player. The key to getting Doug in the band was my friend sent me a you-tube link, it was Guided by Voices when Doug was with them playing “Pop Zeus” at this place in Toronto where Spoon had opened for them, it was the coolest video – its on Speak Kindly [To Your Volunteer Fire Department] which is a record I love – and I knew Doug co-wrote “Pop Zeus” and that’s my favorite stuff, the stuff he was heavily involved in. So when we were on tour with those guys we talked about doing some work together. Then when we needed a guitar player, it occurred to me I could maybe ask Doug to play with The Oranges Band. He was living in Charlotte and moving to New York, and it wasn’t until after the new year that he was able to get it together to practice with us and think about playing with us.

January is where we really started talking. I sent him some tapes and went up and practiced with him in New York. He came down for a couple shows, practiced one time, he played the show and we recorded. Then he overdubbed some stuff and it was off to the races. And at that point, February of this year, I was busy at work for a couple months, got sidetracked, couldn’t dedicate time to finish it, which was good because gave time to reflect and figure out what needed to be focused on and be done. It’s a retarded amount of work and it seems never-ending. It took six months, which is not all that long, but we took our time and did it slowly and spent a zillion dollars.

With the labor you put into an album like this, how do you feel about those albums that get recorded quickly and become sort of accidental, one-off masterpieces?

Roman: A special record can be arrived at through any kind of process, but this just happens to be my process. I wanna do stuff quickly. It’s about connecting with your process as an artist. There are great documents of bands being bands, like I have this recording of Marley and Wailers playing live at Capitol Records, and its great, but its just the band being the band versus the band making lasting versions of those songs.

Dave: Yeah, well that recording is just a lasting version of the band just kicking ass is what it is.

Kind of a general philosophical question, but there’s a little give and take on this record between the lo-fi we might associate with GbV and a little more clarity and depth than on your previous albums. Do you prefer one or the other?

Roman: Honestly, these recordings are better in every way. Better songs, better recorded, better lyrics.

Do you all have favorite moments on the record?

Pat: “Toulouse-Latrec” is my favorite song, but that bridge part in “I Wouldn’t Worry About It” is my favorite part for sure.

Dave: I’d say I like “Gordon’s Nightclub” a lot because its diverse. I feel like this is Roman in his “up the ante” songwriting.

Roman: I think it’s with the recording that the ante is upped. I think some of the songs on The World and Everything In It - I think “Open Air” is about as good a song as I can write. I think the recording is really good, but I realized that after it was produced. Yeah, I mean, once I get some time to reflect. As a song, there could be great songs that are different, but that one specifically was so successful in achieving a goal. I wanted to talk about something really specific, and it came out and I did it, exactly how I wanted to say it. Now I think I can look at it as an outsider

Dave: Whoa, did you just say that? I feel like you never say stuff like that.

Roman: I should say “with perspective”; that song was different. I have an old version, a demo with old lyrics, I worked really hard on the lyrics and I got this song out of it and I feel like that was very successful. That’s just to say I had some experience being satisfied with material. I wanted to make these on the new album as successful. This song “Art Star”, that was a good, same kind of thing, I wanted to say something, and I wanted to put it in a way that personal to this character, from a third person perspective, but it’s still very much about myself and about my ambition. It had a lot to do with ambition and what the buildups are like as an artist. It’s from a differ perspective but the ideas, the things, the challenges this person faces, frustration is the same as I feel.

I hear a certain amount of bitterness in “Art Star”. Is that what you’re shooting for?

Roman: It’s not bitterness to do with myself. It’s meant from the perspective of a character who is frustrated and I wanted to build that character. Its about the art world – I was never that into – but I’ve gotten pretty interested lately, especially on the local level. Trying to recognize some of the challenges that visual artists face has been interesting to me. It’s more challenging than being in a band. I was just kind of imaging what that was like. In art school, you know, just wanna be so good, but you’re in this school with all these people who wanna be so good too and are willing to do everything to get there. And who’s gonna win in that situation? You came in with this goal, you’re going to show them, but you’re facing this challenge, so you burn out, you wanna go home. It goes “You wanted to burn but you never came close” – that’s me, there’s no bitterness outwardly, more like frustration and just working and working working and just failing. It’s just about failing and losing and how hard that is to do. After our last record and some of our experiences on the road, I had to think about the fact that we may lose as a band, we may be losing here, and that’s it. What are you gonna do? You set your goals but no matter what, they might not happen. We’re watching other people get successful but it’s just out of our reach and maybe just not available to us.

Can you talk about this song, "When Your Mask is Your Revealing Feature"?

Roman: That was originally modeled after Peter Gabriel’s song, kind of amalgation of musically a lot of things coming together. Lyrically, “You’re the wolf and you’re so smart when you play it like the sheep / but I see your teeth / they’re white like light bulbs” kinda references when someone kinda plays the underdog, there’s a great band called The Fuses from Baltimore. They did this great song and it had to do with Spoon…

Dave: … Had to be “The Fix Was In”…

Roman: There was this attitude that Spoon was this underdog band and they got screwed. How could you get screwed by a major label? You knew the rules going in. Its’ like somebody who plays like they got screwed, but hey, psst, you didn’t really get screwed. People are buying it. Its not that hard to see through. I wouldn’t call it bitterness. I think a lot of that song was dealing with was what it was like to lose. They face this challenge and they have to deal with the fact that they’re losing.

What keeps you all going then?

Roman: A lot of reason we do this is about community. The thing is, if you don’t make records, people don’t want to hear you, you can’t play anymore. As an artist, you’re just driven to create, it’s about total experience – writing, recording, packaging, working with people, connecting with fans and press and other bands, traveling and driving. I think we all like that, and making a record gives us the chance to do those things.

Dave: I feel like there are a lot of people who want us to come out and play – there are tens of them, spread out over all fifty states. As soon as they have kids, it’ll be nuts. We haven’t put out records for some time, and some people probably don’t realize we’re still doing this because bands break up all the time. We started doing this a long fucking time ago, and one of the things bands don’t manage to accomplish is to stay together. We don’t make a lot of money, and there are a lot of dudes wondering, “How do they do that?” It’s one of the things people ask me, you just have to be dedicated.

Roman: You have to be flexible to it.

Dave: It’s not a simple endeavor.

Roman: You have to be realistic. Sometimes you’re gonna get kicked in the balls and it’s gonna take you three years to put out a record. We put out The World and Everything, two months later our record company tanks and it gets thrown out, and people expect you to fold. It’s not about being successful in that commercial way, because we still get the incentives from reaction from people, friends, at shows. In the last two years, we’ve played with The Lemonheads, Spoon, Polvo, The Fiery Furnaces, AC Newman, so there’s no reason to not do it.

Pat: No real indicators saying we shouldn’t do this.

Roman: People want you to say “oh weve kinda had our chance”

Pat: This is the best thing I’ve played on.

Roman: It’s our best recording, our best songs in one place, and my favorite songs as a songwriter.

Dave: As dormant as we’ve been putting songs out, we’ve still been doing good stuff and other bands are interested in having us be with them. If nothing else, they enjoy what we do. It doesn’t mean worldwide acclaim, for some people that’s not good enough and that’s why they break up. Having your peers like you isn’t enough for some bands.

Roman: Maybe at some point we kinda know, ok, this isn’t worth it anymore.
You’ve also mentioned before how much being on the road appeals to you.

Dave: There’s the allure of it, but it can be all that you want it to be.

Roman: There’s this guy, Greg Preston, who once went to New York with us for some shows. My old band was doing a tour, Greg, my old buddy, had just lost his job and we were doing a three work tour. We went up to New York and we were gonna drop him off in Philly so he could get a bus somewhere on the way back. We kept pressuring him to stay with us on the tour and he said no, no, but he didn’t give us a real reason – it was like “Oh, I got tickets for a Guided by Voices show in two weeks” or something – so were driving down the road and we came to the split where we had to decide: do we drop him off or keep going and he was asleep? Well we just kept going and then he woke up and we were like, “Hey man, sorry, we’re a couple hours from Pittsburgh now.” He just stayed with us. He missed the Guided by Voices show.

You’ve played some big gigs in DC in the past couple years, like the opening slot for the Dismemberment Plan reunion, but now you’re headlining. What your relationship with DC like?

Roman: Now that we’re not on a label and we don’t have this grand idea that we can reach. I focus on things I have control over and things I can influence. One of those is DC. So we meet people, we know people, and I want to play there with more frequency. The reason we don’t play places is because we can’t. I would love DC as a place we can go there once every couple months.

It's not that right now?

Roman: Not yet, but it has elements of it. The Black Cat treats us great, they’re receptive, they respect us, and they’re friends of ours. They see that were trying to reach out and get involved.

Dave: I would say there used to be a gap between DC and Baltimore back in the day, and there still is. I think it was much more significant – like the old “FUDC” stuff – I personally don’t feel that, I used to go there all the time, to the old 9:30 to see shows.

Roman: The thing about the crowd is that they seemed more informed, they seem kinda… Baltimore’s really kinda lives in the present, people get into the bars and the live event, but it feels like it might not extend past that sometimes. DC maybe has a little more perspective, wider appreciation. And it is bigger, though I’m not sure the scene is necessarily, though there’s a bigger crowd to pull people from. There’s always been a little competition.