Uh Oh Interview
Q: Can you talk about your history as an artist?
A: MARI CRISLER (lead guitar/vocals): We’ve been around the Nebraska DIY/indie scene for years with multiple different lineups.
JOE CHAMPION (guitar/vocals): Erik and I have been friends since meeting in the Omaha music scene in high school, and we started the band about seven years ago. We released two EPs with our original lineup, and after some spots opened up we finalized our band nucleus when Mari joined in 2017. Since then we've released two full length albums: Stay Close in 2019 and Good Morning in 2021. We've had some great friends/collaborators rotate in over the years, most recently Jay Jacobson on the drums on both of those albums.
Q: Can you talk about your themes on your new release Good Morning?
A: MARI: The themes on Good Morning mostly revolve around fresh starts and beginning anew after fighting through the darker times of life.
JOE: We’ve always gravitated toward lyrical themes of fighting through loneliness and growing pains, and the past two years have obviously magnified all of those things for everybody. This time around we wrote everything during the quarantine year, which sucked really bad and stopped us in our tracks in a lot of ways, but it also gave us more time to be more intentional and patient with our songwriting. We ended up using the band and our relationships with each other as a filter to take those shitty isolating feelings we all felt individually and turn them into something that held us all together.
For me personally, on top of the relentless dread of the pandemic, my wife and I went through a miscarriage and infertility issues, and her strength was a huge inspiration that helped me keep my feet on the ground. I think that feeling of confronting the weirdness of the world and looking for slivers of hope shines through the album.
Q: What is your recording process like? And has it changed over the years?
A: ERIK TRENT (bass): The way we have recorded hasn’t necessarily changed drastically, but our gained knowledge of the process has allowed us to turn out better quality EPs/albums. We have always taken a kind of DIY approach to recording by recording the instruments ourselves, and prior to the two full lengths we would mix ourselves as well. The biggest change we have made is employing Jeremy Wurst at Coyote Face Recording to mix/master our recordings so they are much more palatable. And he has done such an incredible job.
MARI: We hole up in our bassist Erik’s house and track everything song by song, instrument by instrument. We’ve always tracked DIY, but our last two albums have been mixed and mastered by Jeremy.
Q: Can you talk about your history as an artist?
A: MARI CRISLER (lead guitar/vocals): We’ve been around the Nebraska DIY/indie scene for years with multiple different lineups.
JOE CHAMPION (guitar/vocals): Erik and I have been friends since meeting in the Omaha music scene in high school, and we started the band about seven years ago. We released two EPs with our original lineup, and after some spots opened up we finalized our band nucleus when Mari joined in 2017. Since then we've released two full length albums: Stay Close in 2019 and Good Morning in 2021. We've had some great friends/collaborators rotate in over the years, most recently Jay Jacobson on the drums on both of those albums.
Q: Can you talk about your themes on your new release Good Morning?
A: MARI: The themes on Good Morning mostly revolve around fresh starts and beginning anew after fighting through the darker times of life.
JOE: We’ve always gravitated toward lyrical themes of fighting through loneliness and growing pains, and the past two years have obviously magnified all of those things for everybody. This time around we wrote everything during the quarantine year, which sucked really bad and stopped us in our tracks in a lot of ways, but it also gave us more time to be more intentional and patient with our songwriting. We ended up using the band and our relationships with each other as a filter to take those shitty isolating feelings we all felt individually and turn them into something that held us all together.
For me personally, on top of the relentless dread of the pandemic, my wife and I went through a miscarriage and infertility issues, and her strength was a huge inspiration that helped me keep my feet on the ground. I think that feeling of confronting the weirdness of the world and looking for slivers of hope shines through the album.
Q: What is your recording process like? And has it changed over the years?
A: ERIK TRENT (bass): The way we have recorded hasn’t necessarily changed drastically, but our gained knowledge of the process has allowed us to turn out better quality EPs/albums. We have always taken a kind of DIY approach to recording by recording the instruments ourselves, and prior to the two full lengths we would mix ourselves as well. The biggest change we have made is employing Jeremy Wurst at Coyote Face Recording to mix/master our recordings so they are much more palatable. And he has done such an incredible job.
MARI: We hole up in our bassist Erik’s house and track everything song by song, instrument by instrument. We’ve always tracked DIY, but our last two albums have been mixed and mastered by Jeremy.
Q: What is your creative process like? Were there any differences in your approach from Stay Close to Good Morning.
A: ERIK: The songs on Stay Close, and the two EPs, were created mainly by Joe bringing ideas to us at practice and we all work together to evolve them into an Uh Oh song. Good Morning was the same in the way that Joe and Mari would have some ideas for us, but those ideas were generally full songs already due to COVID not allowing us to have regular practices. They would record demos and send them via Google Drive, and we would all record our individual parts and send them back and forth.
MARI: For this album, Joe and I passed demos back and forth to write the songs, which ended up being much more collaborative, productive and fulfilling to me than our previous writing processes. For Stay Close, it was mostly just Joe writing and the rest of us building on what he had brought, but it was much more of a full-band effort for Good Morning.
JOE: On this album we were able to get a lot more detail-oriented and experimental because of the change in the writing/demoing process. In the past we wrote a lot during practice, so the songs existed first as a live band. Only later would we start to think of dynamics and additional textures to add on the recordings. This time since we passed demos back and forth for months before ever playing the songs live, we were quicker to embrace building songs up from acoustic guitars, keys, percussion, etc., and it let us explore a lot more.
Q: How do you usually go about writing lyrics?
A: MARI: I think of what I want to write about, and I do a sort of free-write about that subject to get all my feelings and thoughts about it out onto paper. Then I pick a few lines from the free-write that stand out and make those the central lyrics and I rhyme around those.
JOE: Most of the time I’ll have an idea of a melody and rhythm first, and then a line or two will pop into my head out of the blue when I’m daydreaming- whether I’m walking around the neighborhood with my dog or trying to fall asleep in the middle of the night. Then later on I’ll go back and try to drill down into the idea and figure out the right words to build it into a fuller theme to explore.
It’s kind of like trying to crack a secret code – I try out a word or phrase and sometimes it works right away, but sometimes it doesn’t, so I slot in something else and WHOA it works and unlocks the next part! And so on. If a piece of the puzzle doesn’t line up, my brain kinda itches obsessively and I’ll keep moving things around until it feels right and then I can breathe easy.
Q: Have you started playing shows or virtual shows?
A: ERIK: We finally had our first show since COVID started on 12/10/21 to release Good Morning. It had been 22 months since we had last played a live show together. Our next one is scheduled for 2/19/22 at The Bourbon Theatre in Lincoln, NE.
A: ERIK: The songs on Stay Close, and the two EPs, were created mainly by Joe bringing ideas to us at practice and we all work together to evolve them into an Uh Oh song. Good Morning was the same in the way that Joe and Mari would have some ideas for us, but those ideas were generally full songs already due to COVID not allowing us to have regular practices. They would record demos and send them via Google Drive, and we would all record our individual parts and send them back and forth.
MARI: For this album, Joe and I passed demos back and forth to write the songs, which ended up being much more collaborative, productive and fulfilling to me than our previous writing processes. For Stay Close, it was mostly just Joe writing and the rest of us building on what he had brought, but it was much more of a full-band effort for Good Morning.
JOE: On this album we were able to get a lot more detail-oriented and experimental because of the change in the writing/demoing process. In the past we wrote a lot during practice, so the songs existed first as a live band. Only later would we start to think of dynamics and additional textures to add on the recordings. This time since we passed demos back and forth for months before ever playing the songs live, we were quicker to embrace building songs up from acoustic guitars, keys, percussion, etc., and it let us explore a lot more.
Q: How do you usually go about writing lyrics?
A: MARI: I think of what I want to write about, and I do a sort of free-write about that subject to get all my feelings and thoughts about it out onto paper. Then I pick a few lines from the free-write that stand out and make those the central lyrics and I rhyme around those.
JOE: Most of the time I’ll have an idea of a melody and rhythm first, and then a line or two will pop into my head out of the blue when I’m daydreaming- whether I’m walking around the neighborhood with my dog or trying to fall asleep in the middle of the night. Then later on I’ll go back and try to drill down into the idea and figure out the right words to build it into a fuller theme to explore.
It’s kind of like trying to crack a secret code – I try out a word or phrase and sometimes it works right away, but sometimes it doesn’t, so I slot in something else and WHOA it works and unlocks the next part! And so on. If a piece of the puzzle doesn’t line up, my brain kinda itches obsessively and I’ll keep moving things around until it feels right and then I can breathe easy.
Q: Have you started playing shows or virtual shows?
A: ERIK: We finally had our first show since COVID started on 12/10/21 to release Good Morning. It had been 22 months since we had last played a live show together. Our next one is scheduled for 2/19/22 at The Bourbon Theatre in Lincoln, NE.