Or, the Whale is playing Wednesday, March 30, at the Iowa City Yacht Club (13 S. Linn St) at 9:00. I asked Alex Robins, lead vocalist and guitarist, some questions:
I understand that your name, Or, The Whale, is also an alternate title for Melville’s Moby Dick. Why did you choose that name?
Our name choice has definitely been a jumping off point for lots of people. Many we’ve come across have really disliked it, going so far as to dismiss us because we have a comma in our name or feel like we’re being pretentious. Honestly, having seven members deciding on a name was taking forever and Matt (our former guitar player) brought up “Or, the Whale.” We liked the animal reference and liked that it didn’t really signify anything. I think as the band has grown and developed our sound, we’ve grown into the name. I think that’s what a band name should ultimately represent. There are tons of great bands out there with bad names but no one particularly cares because they like the band. Plus we always have to repeat ourselves when telling people what our name is. It helps the name stick in your head!
Personally, I love Moby Dick, and think it’s a dark comedy. Do you have any personal reactions to the book? I wasn’t forced to read it in school, and I believe that helped me read it with an open mind. Have you had similar experiences with books in school?
I also really enjoyed Moby Dick and wasn’t forced to read it in high school. The symbols in the book are so classic and there is a particularly comical element to some of the dialogue and Ahab’s slide into madness. And the movie version is so good. Gregory Peck makes everything better. I have a big love of Watership Down as well, also not required reading for me in high school but required for many of my friends. Our song “Black Rabbit” is about the Black Rabbit of Death in that book. My wife bought me a first addition for my birthday a few years ago! I also know that Lindsay Garfield (one of our singers) has written songs about books she has an affinity for (“Never Coming Out” is one example).
Have you always played the same style of music? Can you name a specific spark of inspiration that led you to play your current style? Was it a conscious decision, or something that happened organically as the band coalesced? I.e., was the band formed first, or the idea?
In college, I was in a emo/punk band for a few years. As I got older, my songwriting felt very limited in the punk genre and my tastes were moving towards older records from the 60s and 70s and the alt-country and classic rock genres as a whole. I had a plan to move to San Francisco and form a big, fun country rock band like The Rolling Stones or The Band with lots of harmonies and good rock n’ roll songs. This is the band that came of that idea. We were originally modeled more off of the Gram Parsons/Emmylou Harris model of close harmonies and country music backing. As we began to gel, more songwriting took place collaboratively in the practice space. This allowed for the entire band to have more input and make the songs that much better and more enjoyable for everyone to play. When everyone’s invested in the songwriting, it allows for more enthusiasm and excitement from all of the members. There is still a main idea or lyrics written by one songwriter but the music is more of a group effort.
At times, your music sounds old-fashioned. Not necessarily traditional, but made with care that popular music isn’t made with anymore. As you are based in San Francisco, does its history (gold rush, quake, beatniks, 60s, etc) influence your music? And how about the present-day San Francisco?
As a San Francisco band, we are definitely surrounded by a legacy of artistic endeavors. Much of that is in the Bay Area landscape. You can’t go into the Haight-Ashbury without seeing/hearing the influence that The Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, and Jefferson Airplane have left there (for better and for worse). I think California as a whole influences our and other CA bands’ sound as well. There’s a feel of the ocean, the mountains, the redwoods, the cities. San Francisco now is such a small city in terms of the artistic circles. There’s a lot of members involved in different projects and it’s not as cut-throat as LA or New York. In that way, the hippy vibe is definitely alive and well. People come out to shows to enjoy them, not stand with their arms crossed seemingly asking the band to impress them. We as a band are definitely interested in making classic music; we are informed by that rather than a trend coming down the pipe. In that way, we may be a bit out of touch with trying to get crazy popular by riding whatever sound/style is hip at the moment. But we’re just trying to make honest music and I think that comes across in our records and our live performances. We’re having a good time on stage, playing songs that we
wrote. It’s a pretty great place to be. There was definitely a time where people would try to lump us into the alt-country genre or the folk genre or whatever. It’s so restricting to do that to any band. I understand that people want to describe you to the masses or their friends but there can be a bigger vocabulary used rather than two adjectives that kinda/sorta explain what a band sounds like.
Your song, “Datura” is about the hallucinogenic plant, datura stramonium. Was this written in response to a personal experience?
I personally have never had an experience with datura. I was reading about Carlos Castaneda and enjoyed the words “jimson weed” unto themselves. Datura was just the Latin name. At first, I thought it would sound stupid to sing the word. But I’ve warmed up to it over time. It’s funny, we’ve been criticized before in a review for “obviously never trying datura.” It was such a ridiculous argument to discredit our band. Haven’t we gotten past the point where we have to argue about this? Songs are artistic statements; they don’t have to be true. A lot of them are and lots of mine are. But metaphors themselves are used to portray what something is like, not a direct explanation of an emotion or an experience like “I felt sad” or “The tree was big.” It’s frustrating that this reviewer dismissed us because of that fact. I think he was just pissed because of the comma in our name! Pretentious assholes!
