we are oceans is a four-piece rock bombast composed of members scattered around various parts of massachusetts. bryan counter (drums), justin richner (guitar), derek gilbert (guitar), and nick pagan (bass) met in middle school and began playing music
together at an early age. for the past three years they have blasted new england venues with their blend of understated melody and guitar-driven aggression. their self-titled debut was released in july of 2012 after an extended period of incubating the album’s four songs and honing them through their frequent live shows. these four tracks combine a penchant for catchy, yet substantial, melodies with a keen sense of dynamics. the result is a batch of propulsive epics that alternately unfold and explode. i recently asked drummer bryan counter some questions regarding the process of recording their album and the history of we are oceans.
how is the experience of playing the songs on your album live? did you play them at shows before they were recorded?
yeah, we’d been playing those songs for a long time (the newest one, ‘leaves’, was over six months old at the time of recording, though it had changed considerably). we play them differently each time. it’s kind of hard to explain how the songs vary from show to show though. saying they’re jams misses the point a bit, i think. they’re more nuanced than that. obviously we play different fills and stuff, and i know nick plays differently each time. the biggest noticeable difference is in justin’s playing. in the last part of ‘mmmyellow’, for instance, where on the album (and sometimes at shows) he plays a three-note melody with a lot of delay, a lot of times live he will get down in front of his delay pedal and mess with it, creating some really interesting noises that sound nothing like what he plays on the album. the songs are very structured though, the structure doesn’t usually change, though we do feel parts out a lot — certain parts aren’t defined by how many bars we do something for, but rather by feel. the intensity is always there too.
what influenced this album, aside from other music?
i don’t know if i could pinpoint any specific influences, but i’d say that our debut was mostly a result of a long time of playing together. sometime in 2010 we decided to change our style pretty drastically, and we finally settled on we are oceans as a name (before that point we never really had a name that lasted). but around 2010 we started writing stuff...step actually originated around that time, i think was the first song that wasn’t a reworked version of a song from before the name change. mmmyellow was a 2- or 3-minute song justin and i had recorded as a duo probably in ’08 or ’09. with those two songs, there was a lot of development and they grew to be two or three times their original length. roots and leaves are both newer tunes that one of us had an idea for but ended up being worked on by the group. i guess a subtle but very big influence for the album was hanging out with each other. we all have different personalities, both musical and otherwise, and we can play them pretty effectively off each other. but as far as any other things, like most albums the lives of the musicians involved have a lot to do with the music emotion-wise and such. i can’t speak for the other guys but the album makes me think of different things every time, and a lot of time it simply makes me think of the night we recorded the album. that was a great night.
could you elaborate on the night you recorded the album?
that was one of the best nights of the summer, for sure. we set up our stuff at the piano mill, a piano restoration place where nick worked over the summer, and jared mann of the band funeral advantage came and recorded us. i don’t really remember the process being too stressful or anything; we had been playing the songs live for a long time so they had been written for a while before we recorded them. a few things got added or changed, like one part in ‘step’ for example. i remember waiting a lot, just for the recording stuff to get all set up, and to get levels and whatnot...and right before we started to record, nick’s bass malfunctioned somehow so we had to borrow a friend’s (thanks erich hochstrasser for saving our lives). once we started recording though, there weren’t really any problems. we recorded everything live. ‘step’ was a first take; we were especially happy with that one. we had kind of a false take of ‘roots’ and then the next full one was the one on the album. so the first half of the album was really easy to get, and the second half didn’t take much longer. ‘mmmyellow’ and ‘leaves’ each took two or three takes. i don’t think we had any definite goal for the album other than to just record something that was true to our live sound, that’s what we’re all about. i think we succeeded in that, although our album happens to sound a bit more tame than how we usually play, and maybe a bit slower. it’s weird for me to think that the recordings on the album might be the “definitive” versions of those songs for some people (and even for us sometimes, i know that it influences the way i play live sometimes) considering that in some ways it’s just another live set. i’m really happy with how it turned out, though. there are some beautiful moments in the other guys’ playing. for example, around 11:08 in ‘leaves’, derek plays three descending notes and then starts strumming a chord and it inexplicably sounds like another guitar track comes in. i have no idea how that happened. there are a lot of little mistakes or things that weren’t written out, like little hesitations, that sound right to us now after hearing the album a number of times.
were there any specific events during the writing or recording of the album that particularly colored the music? was it difficult composing the songs, due to their length, or did they evolve on their own?
the music was mostly colored by playing it and seeing what worked and what didn’t. our songs definitely evolve on their own. after a certain point, it’s like they write themselves in a way. this works in different ways: sometimes parts that are there get replaced, and sometimes totally new parts are added. the original recording of ‘step’ that we have from 2010 was just as long as the version on the album, but it had probably 4 or 5 parts instead of the one on the album, which has way more. it never used to have the drum breaks or a part in 5/4, so those got added. one part was replaced/improved. the part after the second chorus thing used to be a lot simpler, kind of lame, with just the chords and an uninteresting drum part; that was actually something that changed not long before we recorded it (luckily). it’s not too difficult to write the songs. someone’s idea always just gets taken and built upon. i’m not a theory guy at all, so i usually play a big part in organizing the songs and giving atmospheric suggestions. one thing i always try to do is make sure the drum parts are interesting enough to stand on their own, which can get tricky at times.
why did it take so long to get the album released physically?
i think that was kind of a combination of us not really knowing what to do and us being more concerned with just getting it out in general. also, it was released about a month before school started, so we were pretty busy at the time. we did do some handmade copies for the first few shows after it came out, but they didn’t really sell/nobody really cared. the only reason it’s out on tape right now is because we know the sharpest. vas is a great dude and he hooked us up, and the tapes are beautiful. we might have some nice looking cds on the way too. we’re kind of notoriously lazy about getting stuff like that done though, like for example we just now got shirts, after having been a band for 3 years.
how do the song titles relate to the songs themselves?
it’s hard to say how they relate. ‘mmmyellow’ already came with that name from when justin and i used to play it (and i have no idea why we called it that), so that just stuck. ‘leaves like stained glass’ was nick’s name for what became that tune, so he could speak better about that one, but that one to me makes a lot of sense to me (the stained glass, especially) because to me the beginning kind of sounds like bells or chimes, reminiscent of church. we don’t mean for the titles to suggest any particular narrative though, and that is certainly just my own thought process with ‘leaves’ (the title also fits with the cover, i think). ‘step’ probably got named that because it’s upbeat, haha. i think the titles fit very well with the pieces but not really in any way that can be explained.
what will 'we are oceans' do next?
well, we’re kind of getting our shit together regarding merchandise. we finally have shirts and tapes, as i mentioned, and we have buttons with the album cover on them. as far as new material, we’ve been playing two new songs called ‘dead winds’ and ‘solstice’ at our shows recently, and those will make up half of a second album most likely. we have three or four other songs in the works that we’ll hopefully start playing sometime soon. i think our next recording project will be a split once we work a few details out, so that should be cool. we’ve been playing a fair amount despite the distance between our respective schools, which has been great. hopefully over the summer we’ll be hitting some new areas as well.
below is a link to a live recording of 'solstice'. we will be rereleasing we are oceans' self-titled debut sometime in the near future. listen to the album now at weareoceansband.bandcamp.com and keep up to date with them at facebook.com/weareoceansband
https://soundcloud.com/grandmother-clock/solstice-as220-1