Under Mics with the Oranges Band #1

PopMatters has had plenty of nice things to say about Baltimore’s the Oranges Band (specifically here and here. When the band announced that they were headed into the studio to begin work on their new record, having soldiered through personnel changes and struggles at their label, Lookout Records, it seemed like an excellent time to catch up and to allow them to speak for themselves by cataloging the happenings. Over the next several weeks, Oranges Band frontman Roman Kuebler will write in with updates from the sessions for the band’s third full-length. Judging from the preview of the songs that the band gave at a recent show at Cake Shop in New York City, the arrangements are denser and the lyrics step a city block away from the sundazed atmospherics of their last album. Always an excellent live band, I’ve never heard them sound better. The hope now is that Kuebler will help us better understand the process, or at least the process in this specific case, of taking a group of people and a set of songs and bringing them into a studio for a set amount of days, singing and playing into microphones, plugging and unplugging effects boxes, adjusting levels, hoping nothing important breaks or gets lost or erased, and then, hopefully, walking out with a finished document that comes close to your expectations and which you can then turn around and call your new album.

— Jon Langmead

The Name of This Band Is The Oranges Band

So we’re making this album and when making an album it’s important to remember that a recording is a factual document for the most part. It is the representation of a performance that happened for real. (It’s important to remember that when listening to an album also.) It is a point of view that doesn’t necessarily change anything but it does, for better or worse, kind of level the playing field. So, no matter what the budget, or where it was done, when the engineer hit the record button, David Bowie physically performed the lead vocal to “Young Americans”. (It is also rather funny to think about this fact when you hear it come on the PA at K-Mart while shopping for household items.)

Now, of course, in the context of beginning to make a new record this is NOT what you want to remember. I mean, it is really hard to try and create anything in a world where you are, theoretically, on a level field with David Bowie. But what is useful in that theory is that you have a time and a method to record these ideas that you have come up with… and that is what you have and that is when it is going to happen. All of the performances are added together and sometimes refined and sometimes redone and sometimes removed and, in the end, they make up your “SONG”. And your songs are then added and ordered and then re-ordered and sometimes removed and this makes your “ALBUM”. And it has happened a million times before and more and more and more and will continue, in some way, forever, I think.

I have to admit, though, I do tend to get a little hung up on the whole idea of the album. It’s about the potential. We all know what albums mean to us, so… you know, can I make one of those? But in starting this album, our third proper full length, the approach is meant to be a little less deliberate and a little more natural. Let the band sound like the band and let the songs be the songs… as well as they can be, at least.

The Oranges Band on this as-yet-to-be-named album, are a much different group than we were just over a year ago and on our last album, The World and Everything In It, which came out in 2005. When dealing with a group of people you never know what is going to go down and most of the fun happens when things get unexpected. Losing our bass player to the family life and then losing both his replacement and our long-time lead guitar player to what amounts to a sitcom of inter-band dynamics left only Dave [Voyles] on the drums and myself on guitar and on the mic. Faithfully soldiering on, it took us no time at all to catch Baltimore’s Pat Martin, our erstwhile touring companion, up on the bass bits and we spent most of the year clowning around as a three piece with an occasional fourth wheel, Jim Glass (whom we borrowed from Impossible Hair) doing mostly backing vocals. But as for carrying on with this album, I think we knew that we would need to fill out the spots with another guitar (because we love guitars) and I knew that I didn’t want to just add parts on top of my parts (because I am not that impressive on the leads, eh?) so we’d need a new axe.

I had been wondering for awhile what we were going to do about not having that fourth corner when my friend sent me a YouTube clip of Guided By Voices playing “Pop Zeus”. The Oranges Band had toured with GBV a couple years earlier and I did a few tours playing bass with Spoon, who also toured with GBV, so I knew Doug Gillard (GBV’s only true lead guitar) and the rest of the guys well enough. Doug and I had often talked about doing some work together. As far as I am concerned, “Speak Kindly…” is the best treatment of Bob Pollard’s songs and I had dreams that Doug could work a similar strain of magic with some of my songs as well. So while I am watching this clip of “Pop Zeus” I remembered that Doug had co-written this one… and what a great song this is… and what a great player Doug is… and what ever happened to us working on some songs… and wait a minute, I need a guitar player!

And now you are wondering why, if this is a recording blog, is there no talk of recording and microphones and compression ratios and digital vs. analog and such like. Well, it’s because we haven’t started!

— Roman Kuebler