Interview with Orion Faruque on The Good Stuff

On September 3, 2021, Orion and the Melted Crayons dropped their debut full-length album, The Good Stuff, and we're honored to bring you an exclusive look into this fascinating recent release. For Orion Faruque, The Melted Crayons is a creative outlet existent as a body of songs and music. As such, exploration is a central component of The Good Stuff: deep, profound studies of style, emotion, and production construct the album's varied sonic and thematic textures. Orion has demonstrated a penchant for poetic lyricism and artful composition through years as a prominent songwriter, producer, and music teacher in the Charlottesville indie scene, yet this arresting tour de force provides the most holistic look at these capacities through his own work.

Boxcar Collective's Zack Holden spoke with Orion Faruque over coffee about this latest release, covering everything from pandemic-era collaboration to fundamental themes of thankfulness and positivity to future creative directions for The Melted Crayons.

Zack Holden: Starting things off, The Melted Crayons is—at its core—a vehicle for collaborative songwriting and composition; however, almost half of the tracks on The Good Stuff were written at the height of the pandemic when collaboration was very difficult, if not outright impossible. So, would you say that this obstacle affected your process, and if so, how did that come through in the end product?

Orion Faruque: That's a great question. So, before COVID the collaborative nature of songwriting was allowing me to perform with people and kind of allow emergent songwriting to show up—like jamming, or someone would play something, and I'd hear it and then take it home and write on it. But, the songs that were written during the pandemic were a lot more introspective: I was given time by the world to just sit there and write stuff. Once I had the material written, I listened to it and thought about who I thought the right voice would be to flesh it out musically, and with the Internet, I was able to digitally collaborate with people. So, some of the music was fleshed out by people all around the country, but the tracks that weren't were actually a way for me to learn how to collaborate with myself, and [how to] sort of be alone, and how to interact with myself in a different way, and [how to] add layers to things that I'm doing. Because I do that for my clients, but for my own work it required me to kind of look in a mirror a lot stronger.

ZH: So, would you say that this is a practice that you've kept moving forward?

OF: Yes, this affected my work overall, like acknowledging when I need to ask for help and when I need to hire someone. When I need to work with other people versus when I can do something, and feeling that. Like when I sit down and try to do something and understand when I'm feeling frustrated because it's a hard task that I'm trying to do versus when I'm just not the right voice for it. And I'm trying to make my voice—my musical voice, if you will—into a cartoon of myself, or of someone else, really. So, I think definitely, yes.

ZH: On a related note, the album feels very cohesive despite the fact that it was written in two vastly disparate worlds. Did you consciously try to connect the post-pandemic songs to the older songs from the catalog, or was there a natural unity among them that came through almost de facto?

OF: In November of 2021, I was starting to realize that I had this collection of COVID songs that I could turn into a Crayons album. I started to look at them and think about songs from our older catalog that would bridge a little bit between the songs and create a more cohesive, full story. But, I also think the average of the songs is The Melted Crayons. That's me. That's my writing voice. That's why it sounds cohesive. But, there was some intentionality that the older songs are similar.

ZH: So, has your production process changed a lot over time? What does that look like for you?

OF: With the production process, the more I do it, the faster I go, and the more I want to release it quickly or be done with it quickly and think about a comprehensive marketing plan. But, I will continue to just work and work and work and work. That's some of the beauty of what happened with The Good Stuff. In retrospect, listening to it sometimes I think about it, and sometimes I think it actually sounds a little too pretty. There's too much prettiness, and there needs to be some amount of "ugly", which comes off sometimes in rapidly doing something or intentionally creating ugly. Like the first EP that I created, which came out four years ago on May 20th, was this acoustic EP that I made in my grandma's living room down in North Carolina. I woke up on Sunday morning and decided that in 24 hours I was gonna release an EP. So, I did four songs, and I just did them as fast as possible. It's very imperfect. There's lots of ugly points in it. But, what shines through that is the raw emotion of what's happening. I feel like it can block people sometimes: not having that polishedness can block people from understanding the song. But, if there's people there who listen for it, they can hear it, which is cool.

ZH: This might be a bit of an unfair question, but do you have any favorite moments on the record, and if so, what in particular makes them stand out to you?

OF: No, I absolutely do have some favorite moments. Actually, I would say that there's a favorite moment in each particular song. Like "E9" is the song that everyone's been listening to, which kind of surprised me. It was the first one I released, but it was the one I wrote without thinking. There's a lyric that says, "Stop and take a break." Everything just stops and then the music comes back in after "take a break" and you relax into the music. I like using that [technique] a lot. On the last song, "Skylark Suite", which is actually my mandolin debut, there are a couple mandolin notes that I really like, and I play dobro on that track, which I also really liked doing…. "The Good Stuff" has my friend Gina Sobel playing horns on it, so I really like just the feeling of the horns. "Kaleidoscope" overall is just a song that was living in my head for a long time. So, having it out there—and that relaxation of not having to remember the song and being able to show someone the song—is really cool.

ZH: The horns on "The Good Stuff" were definitely one of my favorite parts of the album, as well as the bassline on "What Is Love".

OF: I was going for a D'Angelo thing [on "What Is Love"]. That was actually really funny. So, I was living over in Fry's Springs [a neighborhood in Charlottesville] at the time, and I got back from something. I think it was around 2 a.m., and I was sitting in my apartment with a Novation controller and headphones tracking that bassline, but I was exhausted. I remember waking up at 3:15, and my hand was sitting on a low F with that insanely low, just fat synth bass. I had no idea how long I had been asleep, and I thought—because it had been blasting in my headphones—that I had my speakers on, and I was like, "Oh, no. This has just been blasted by this amp for the past twenty minutes." Yeah, that was a special moment. 

ZH: Did you have a lot of those on the album, like small moments of discovery that became big parts of tracks?

OF: Yeah, I think little emotions and also just little ways I learned how to do something faster. Really, [this] album helped me learn how to make my own music, because my job is making other people's music. And I know a lot of tips and tricks, but I never thought about applying them to my own music for some reason. I just thought about making the music and just kind of stopping there. But actually pushing myself creatively with my own stuff is really cool. So, yeah. Thinking about horn arrangements, … I was in Oklahoma, and I opened my iPhone notes—and I knew the rhythm I wanted, and a couple of the notes I wanted. So, I just charted it out with music notes and sent it to Gina. I was like, "I think this is what I'm going for. I trust that you'll take this and turn it into something." Which she did, and … I had one or two major revisions. Then, she sent it back again. But yeah, one of the big things I learned was trusting people more through the creation of that, which has been really huge.

ZH: And there's a lot of really diverse instrumentation on the record, too. So, did you use a lot of MIDI tracks, or did you go to a lot of other musicians, or did you play a large range of instruments yourself?

OF: Yes, to all of those. There's actually not as much MIDI on this particular record. MIDI-wise, there's some of the keyboard stuff. I think I played—with the exception of "Headlights" and "Dog Song"—all of the keyboard and bass parts on the record. I had Ryan Wood play drums on three tracks, and the rest is me on an electronic drum set, like MIDI drums. But I like to trigger them with a MIDI drum kit because it's so much faster instead of finger drumming. If you're going for real drumming, playing it like you're playing it just sets your brain up [better]. So, a lot of the keys stuff was either synth or MIDI. Overall, I don't think there's a lot of MIDI. The horns are other people, but a lot of the guitars and strings are me or someone in the band.

ZH: Thematically, The Good Stuff explores how to uncover the good in any situation by living wholly and meaningfully in the present moment. I was hoping that you could expound upon this idea and maybe explain a bit more of what it means to you, which I feel like you've touched on a bit already.

OF: I think that's just really important, first of all. That first year of COVID was actually really beneficial for me, since I was going from a time when I was touring a lot and busy all the time. Sometimes we'd start a show at 11 p.m.—that's when we'd be starting to play—and it was just exhausting. I love that. I love playing like that, but I was getting really exhausted. So, at first it was nice to have that space. But then the election happened that year, and I was living with a roommate who was not on the same page. So, "The Good Stuff", that track, the second verse is about that situation. It's about how my heart was breaking watching all these people be torn apart by political divides. And there are really negative things in the world, but they do showcase positivity through that. So, I try to look for that, which can be annoying to some people, but I feel like it helps me just want to be alive. I don't really know why I think about it that way; it's probably just how I was raised, always looking for something positive. Like one of the things my mom always did for me when I was a kid, she gave me a notebook and said, "When you wake up, just write ten things that you're thankful for." That changes your brain to be searching for positivity from the day before instead of negativity from the day before. I still do that sometimes as an adult.

ZH: I think it's a good way to look at things. I mean, my parents always taught me the "glass half full" mentality. The biggest thing you have in life is how you react to things, so if you react positively, even in a negative situation, then it can help strengthen an optimistic mindset.

OF: Yeah, so no one can be mad about how you feel about something. You aren't responsible for your feelings. You are responsible for your reaction to your feelings, and I think that's really important.

ZH: Switching gears, one of my favorite parts about listening to the album was getting to drift through the rolling sonic landscape, which seamlessly transitions from Americana to psychedelic funk to neo-soul and everything in between. How did you arrive at this unique sound, and were there any primary artistic influences shaping its development?

OF: That's a great question. I think I arrived at that [sound] from being a multi-instrumentalist and playing in so many different bands over the years. I personally love so many different sounds and [styles of] music. I just [recognize] whatever the song is asking for and try to follow that. I've always looked for instrumentalists who aren't stuck in one genre when we're playing live because I write so diversely. I've written for bands and artists for a long time. Listening to what the artist does, understanding it, and then just writing a song for them. I think that just affects how I write things. Then, there were some really strong influences. Like "What Is Love", that's D'Angelo. The last song, "Skylark Suite", I wrote in North Carolina [around] when I was moving to Virginia, when I was heavily influenced by the John Butler Trio. It's in a specific open tuning that he used and I really love and explored. "Headlights" is something that I wrote with Elie Bashkow in Cuba. That song really doesn't have a lot of influences, but a lot of people say it sounds like Shakey Graves. I feel like oftentimes you aren't consciously thinking about influences, but they arise. I'm just trying to listen to what the song is asking for and respect that. The other thing is, I did think about the order of songs: how to walk people through the emotions and how to responsibly bring people up and bring people down.

ZH: I love instrumental tracks, and the transition from "Leela's Song" into "E9" is seamless. When I listened to the album for the first time I thought that they were both the same song.

OF: Yeah, which is crazy because "Leela's Song" was the first piece of music that I wrote after meeting my niece for the first time. So, that was a personal way of giving her something so that she knows—like if she ever comes to a show and we play that [song]—that I love her. But then I realized that it worked really well musically. We used to jam a lot as a band. Right now, we're playing a lot of short shows that don't [give us] a lot of time to explore and ramble and jam, so it's harder. But overall, we were a kind of a jammy band, and so I loved finding instrumental sections, or instrumental moments, that we would loop and jam and explore, and then exiting that into another song.

ZH: So, trying to make that improvisation of jamming live come through in your studio tracks.

OF: Yeah, I've always thought that our live performance was better than our studio performance, just energetically. But, I'm starting to think now that they're kind of equal. Knowing how to really translate my music into the studio was really fun.

ZH: Makes sense, since they really are such different beasts.

OF: Yeah, so different.

ZH: And, I guess it's different for The Good Stuff, but in a typical recording session with the band, would you track together or separate?

OF: Yes and no, depending on the track and the players involved. Because with some of the players—if I think they're the right voice, but they're not experienced recording-wise—I might take a different approach to working with them. So, we did a bluegrass-style single back in 2018 ["Where'd You Go? (Live in Studio)"], and that was very much in one room with one microphone. We all gathered around it, and I wanted to mix the violin quieter. So, I said, "Move two feet back." I wanted to mix the guitar louder, so I said, "Move forward." You can hear that. You can hear when I smile in the track. You can hear when the bass player hears me about to mess up a lyric. And he's trying to help, so he like plays something to pull me back into the music, which I think is really good. And [in terms of] the new music I'm making, all of it—with the exception of two or three singles—is definitely me in the studio with different players, like a group of people, playing organically live at the same time.

ZH: So, to go off of that in a sense, as The Melted Crayons' debut album, The Good Stuff seems to me like not only a major triumph, but also a major artistic step for the group. Now that the dust has settled a bit nine months later, how do you feel that the record has impacted its trajectory?

OF: So, it's impacted me personally a lot, obviously, but it's also impacted the business entity and like the band and the brand hugely because people are now able to bring our music into their space without hiring the band to come play. They're able to enjoy it on their own. They're able to listen to it. And when we're playing shows now, people are yelling the lyrics. People are singing the lyrics in a way that they wanted to before, but they didn't know how to because they couldn't learn them. So, I think that's been a huge impact, and that's been a way that I feel connected with people. It's also affected the players because there's an empirical reference for what the song is. When I want to play with someone, I send them the songs—and a chart if I have one—and I'm like, "This is what we're gonna play." Then, they show up, and the first time we play the song it feels like we've played it ten times already. Because we have. They've played with the recording, and I've played with the recording. So, it impacted that. It's allowed for different expectations, which allow for different growth as a band. I'm always looking at our Spotify, just to check it out, and I'm seeing the music being [listened to] in all these different countries all over the world, which is incredible. It's cool because people will ask questions about the music and ask what something means, which indicates to me that they're sitting with it, and they're enjoying it, and they're putting it on when they're having a hard time and trying to feel better. Which is good, for me.

ZH: And moving forward from The Good Stuff, do you have a specific creative direction that you're looking to pursue?

OF: One of the recording studios I was an engineer and producer at closed in October. So, one of the last things we did there before it closed was record an Americana EP of songs that were tied to the room or that sound. That's still in the works. We have three other independent singles of that stuff that I've been working on. In January, I flew to Minneapolis with one of the band members and hired my friend who runs a really great studio out there—and a session drummer and bass player that I know from going to school there—and we cut some more rock-oriented stuff. Like really loud, kinda blues rock on one track; more 2000s emo pop-rock on another track; and then like a funk-soul rock song. That's stuff that I'm working on now. From then on, I'll have to finish that stuff to kinda see the next stuff. The big thing I'm really trying to do is try to start playing this music for folk festivals … and getting it to people who really want to listen to it. And making more videos. I really like making music videos.

Orion Faruque, the central visionary and driving force behind Orion and the Melted Crayons. (PC: Orion Faruque)