| The following is an
excerpt from the Oranges Band Are Invisible blog on PopMatters.com.
Read the whole story here!
The Oranges Band Are Invisible. An album is
not an album without a name. And after what seems, now, like
an eternity, this collection of songs is, officially, an album.
Not only because the album now has a name but also because
it collects the experience of writing and rehearsing it, demoing
and recording it, mixing and fixing it, and yes, naming it.
For me, processing and reflecting on all of
the stages that went into the making of this album is rather
overwhelming. Our last album was released close to four years
ago and this new album, because albums are the benchmarks
of a band’s history, is responsible for gathering all
the experiences since then and, somehow, defining the band
through these songs and under this title, The Oranges Band
Are Invisible. Easy enough to consider that no album could
really comprehensively sum up four years of any band’s
history, right? Well, what is overwhelming about that concept
is that I might be the only person in the world for whom this
album really CAN do that.
A band’s album is so many levels. It’s
songs and performances and ideas and potential but at the
end of the day, it’s a product. A physical product that
has a name and a visual reference so that it can be classified
among the other albums that people experience. What this means
is that after working forever on getting your music where
you want it to be, you have to wrap it up in a package to
sell it. It needs a name and artwork that will classify and
define it. Now, assuming the responsibility for just about
everything in the progression of a band has it’s advantages…
I guess you can claim all the credit for your, many…
errr, ummm, well, some of your successes. You know, you get
to ride in the convertible at the parade! You get, also, to
own (outright) all failures! The fringe benefit, the one that
people don’t see, though, is that you get to wake up
in the middle of the night realizing that the artwork is not
going to complete itself.
I really like doing the artwork for albums
but not necessarily for my own albums (even though I’ve
done every one). It deserves so much focus and attention and
I found that, after having “left it all on the field”
during the recording, the artwork can be a daunting task.
Not only it is creatively stressful but it is also a technical
exercise that requires patience and administration, commodities
in short supply at the end of the album-making process. It
was with this in mind that I sat awake in bed one night devising
ways to get around doing the artwork this time. The obvious
answer was to have someone else do it. Employ one of my many
talented and artistic friends to create a great concept and
execute it, visually, to perfection. Sadly, it’s an
idea as simple as it is unrealistic. I have tried this many
times and it has been my experience that artists, myself included,
are as capitalistic as the next guy. Well maybe not if the
next guy is an investment banker or something, but we still
operate on the “time is money” concept and creating
an album cover takes a LOT of time. Of course most bands,
ours included, find that money is another commodity in short
supply at the end of the album-making process so that didn’t
seem like a workable solution.
Still lying awake, racking my brain to figure
out how to get out of doing the artwork, I was nearly resolved
to having to put in the hours of being shackled to my computer,
staring at the screen when, in a MacGyver-like flash of inspiration
I thought, “What if there is NO artwork?” Wait…
what?! The basic thought of an album with no artwork is a
little too easy. I mean, again, an album needs to be represented
visually in some way and needs to be a physical product so
it had to be something but an adjusted concept that eliminated
paper sleeves and tray cards did seem legitimate. Not only
did it seem manageable, but I was quickly aware of how the
idea of a “paperless” album actually challenged
the popular concept of music packaging at a time when the
music industry is struggling to define the value of music
and the legitimacy of the compact disc format against, obviously,
the digital format which has no physical representation. I
liked it’s environmental statement as well, even though
it’s still a lot of plastic… well, we won’t
sell too many then, out of concern for the environment.
Ok, so having convinced myself I can get around
the idea of artwork, at least in the traditional sense I still
had to name the album. Easy enough, if the Beatles did the
“White Album” with the all white artwork and Metallica
did the “Black Album” (uh, I mean Spinal Tap-never
figured out if that was a joke by Metallica), then we were
going to claim the “Clear Album”. Knocking it
around a bit I thought it best to shy away from inviting comparisons
to the Beatles, which would seem a little self important,
and came around to the idea of the “Invisible Album”.
But you can’t write it on the album and say it’s
the “Invisible Album” and I am sure we wouldn’t
get the opportunity to nickname our album through the press
or anything so I had to figure out a way to call it something
that included invisible. By the way, I am still lying in bed
thinking about all this. Even though it takes a couple hours
to sit and recount the episode in writing the whole thing
developed in about three minutes I would guess. Crazy, huh?
As I am cycling through a number of album title options utilizing
the “invisible” theme, I thought about The Oranges
Band Are Invisible. I think some of the others were just Invisible
or The Invisible Band or just stuff like that but when I got
around to The Oranges Band Are Invisible, I was immediately
reminded of The Fuses Are Lies. The Fuses were one of the
great Baltimore bands of the late 90s and have inspired many
Oranges Band songs and, along with a handful of other local
Baltimore groups, are largely responsible for me playing in
bands at all. This album draws deeply, both lyrically and
musically, on that music and that time in my life so this
association with the title really felt right to me. I love
it when a concept comes together!
Finally, in thinking about the title I was
toying with the idea of an invisible band. The Oranges Band
have always felt a little bit like the invisible band, kind
of hiding in plain sight. Not necessarily the underdogs or
the attention-getters but more the guys who fade into the
landscape a bit. I don’t mind that so much as it sort
of accurately describes our perception and maybe our place.
We have an understated appeal, that’s all. I appreciated
how the title of the album is a statement about our band from
our band. And hey, I mean the Invisible Man, right? Who hasn’t
dreamt of being the Invisible Man? He’s easily one of
the coolest superheros–or was he a menace?! I guess
I didn’t see that one. |
