Oy Vey is a rock/pop duet of gutarist/vocalist Bryce Aubrey and keyboard player/vocalist Kevin Corcoran. Although they live in different cities, they managed to come up with a very dynamic sound.
Who inspired your music?
Musically, we were getting into a lot of newer rock artists like MGMT and Ariel Pink. We were also really into a lot of dance based pop acts, such as Robyn and Hot Chip. Our older influences were also really important to us as we were putting it together. Artists like Bruce Springsteen and Fleetwood Mac have always been a big obsession for us.
A big part of our goal with this project was to see if we could tap into that kind of lush bigness in something totally home recorded with relatively minimal equipment. We recorded the whole album on a laptop with just a copy of Logic Pro, so the challenge was to tap into all those sounds we loved, while working on a shoestring budget.
[youtube 6u_4b08Lxoc nolink]Tell us how you collaborated being from different cities?
We’ve known each other since middle school and have always been big pop music junkies. Throughout high school we were always hanging out and whenever we weren’t talking about how much we hated school, we were blabbing endlessly about music.
After we graduated we went our separate ways and moved around for a while, to New York, New Orleans and Chicago amongst other places. We were never living in the same city, but always kept in touch and throughout all that time we were always keeping tabs on what each other were doing musically. It wasn’t until 2010 that we decided to get together again and try to actually cut a record together, despite the fact that we were still geographically distant.
So once we started kicking around the ideas for “Botanical”, we would both send demos back and forth via Gmail, bouncing tunes off each other and trying to embellish what the other had started. We spent a few weeks pooling our favorite demos and when the time came, we got together in Chicago and laid down the final recordings of the songs.
All the tracking and mixing took place in a little one bedroom apartment on a laptop computer. Using drum loops and synth plug-ins we tried to flesh out the material as much as possible with just the two of us playing pretty much all the parts, with a few guest appearances from our friends here and there.
“White Lies” MP3: http://glgpub.com/_/audio/Oy-Vey-White-Lies.mp3
How would you classify your music and tell us about it?
The music we try to make is homegrown pop with a high energy feel. The elements that both of us have always admired from our favorite artists have often been the hooks and personality they brought to the table. Although we’re major musical omnivores, at the end of the day we’ve always had a great love for old school pop. Beyond that we’ve also always been fascinated by the eccentric production that can be paired with a really straight forward melody. Going all the way back to the crazy ideas of people like Brian Wilson, Paul McCartney or Lindsey Buckingham, those were always the records that captivated us the most.
What was so great about this project, and the way that we did it ourselves was that we had full freedom to really indulge whatever madness popped into our heads. We’d both had experiences working on studio records before, but had always hit the wall creatively at key moments because of the expenses and time constraints that come along with that. Here we only had each other to keep ourselves in check, but the balance between our two musical sensibilities allowed us to start chasing those sounds that had been distant before. We were on the same page from the beginning with what we wanted, which made the process very easy and fun.
What do you want listeners to get from your music?
We wanted our album to be fun to make and fun to listen to. We’re big fans of music that travels all over the place, but still has plenty of bounce to it, and we wanted to produce a record with a lot of energy and a lot of range. The process of making it was really a big experiment between the two of us, and we were challenging each other while making it to load it up with as many quirky little touches as we could. We’re hoping that people will enjoy listening to it as much as we enjoyed making it.
As far as the songwriting went, the tunes on this album were all written out of our experiences living in big cities as twenty-something post-grads with poor self-control, who were just kind of screwing around. We wanted to make music that captured a little of that restless energy.
Any new projects in the works?
We are actually just now putting the finishing touches on our second record, “Recession Girls”. As soon as we finished “Botanical Curiosity”, we couldn’t help ourselves but start working on a follow-up, which has been a great joy as well. For this second one, we’re still home recording, and doing it all ourselves, but we’ve gotten the chance to call in a few musical favors from musicians that we know and up our production level a bit. We’re really excited to finish it up, and presumably crank on into the next record. We’re expecting to get it out in early 2012.
What would you like to be doing 5 years from now?
In some ways, more of the same. With whatever higher level of recording that we can pull off, we would really love nothing more than to working on our fifth record by then. Although it is pretty cold in Chicago, so ideally we’d like to be doing it in some big old house of the south of France instead. It’ll be easier to play our instruments if we can take off our mittens for a few minutes.
By: Diana Olson diolson05@yahoo.com
