“My first experience owning albums was a result of my trumpet teacher sending me home with jazz CDs every week. After lessons he’d burn me a CD of some iconic jazz player, whether it be Wynton Marsalis, Jon Faddis, Dizzy Gillespie—or my all time favorite, Maynard Ferguson. I didn’t have a portable CD player so I’d stand next to the radio we had in our living room that had a CD player attached and just listen to it there. Every week I’d have no clue what I was getting so it was like unwrapping a present each time I’d pop one in the player.”
“From there I started wanting more CDs and I remember going to Walmart to get To The Sea by Jack Johnson on its release day. I couldn’t find it anywhere so I asked an employee about it and they found an unopened box that had just arrived and they cut it open for me and handed me a copy. I was pumped because I felt like I was the first in the world to have that album.
From there I kept getting more and more CDs and I was intrigued by vinyl, especially because it was starting to get popular again, but I didn’t have a turntable and I didn’t have a lot of money growing up so it wasn’t something I thought too much about getting. But then one year for my birthday, I was surprised when my best friend got me my all-time-favorite album Narrow Stairs by Death Cab for Cutie. And they got it for me on vinyl. I was pumped. It felt like this massive piece of music in my hands, almost like it was bigger than life. It felt like a piece of art, and I was hooked.
After that I started buying vinyl from other bands I enjoyed, in particular Dawes. I loved their records, and I started to appreciate the warm sound of it in contrast to the CDs. It made the CDs sound too bright, and it started to have an effect on how I chose to mix our music as well. I wanted to mix for that warmth. To this day, it’s almost routine that our mastering engineers will add a little brightness and a little bump in our trebles on our masters because I tend to mix so much for the warmth.
I took that approach with our “Command Shift EP” as well. I’d been at home more during the pandemic, listening to a lot of music around the house and throwing on old vinyl we had laying around. It made finishing the EP a little easier and helped me to not overthink the production. We also decided to keep it short and sweet, like a 7” record.”
—Andrew Oliver
“Command Shift,” the new EP from Brother Oliver arrives in stores on Friday December 4, 2020.
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PHOTO: SARAH MARIE MARKO
