As is Victoria’s musical tradition, the start of a new month means a new featured Zone band of said month. February’s BotM is a collaboration between two of the region’s hardest working artists, Jon Middleton and Sierra Lundy, known collectively as Ocie Elliott. Rocktographers met up with the Jon half of the duo to talk time management, being local, and their upcoming album We Fall In.
Dallas Ross: Tell me a little about Ocie Elliott. How did you guys come together?
Jon Middleton: Well, we met about five years ago on a chat site for cat lovers and just sort of, clicked. I’m joking, but we did have a pretty instantaneous connection. We met for the first time in a cafe on Salt Spring Island where Sierra was working (debatable) and I was lullabying the gushing audience. We can’t exactly recall why we started singing together, but however it happened, we decided pretty quickly it shouldn’t stop happening because it felt pretty damn good. About a year and a half ago we spent an exhausting and annoying (for our close friends and family especially) chunk of time coming up with the name Ocie Elliott, and once that felt nice and official, we started taking it seriously.
DR: What do you want people to think about when they think of Ocie Elliott?
JM: A happy recollection of the olden days even if you weren’t there for them. A warm cup of something with a twist. Hot tubs in the rain. Road trips, train trips, a good Tom Robbins book. Candles, and a soft reminder that everything will be okay as long as we love each other (and allow ourselves an occasional glass of wine or two).
DR: What does it mean to you, if anything, to be recognized as one of the top-tier bands in your hometown?
JM: We are flattered you say so — I guess it means we blush a little! Wherever we sit on the ranks, we feel very fortunate and grateful for the opportunities to play for audiences filled with people we know or recognize. We also get the occasional greeting in the street from kind strangers, which feels really nice (and also blush-worthy).
DR: You’re both so active with other projects and artistic endeavors, how do you manage your time?
JM: ‘Do we manage our time? ’ might be the better question. *laughs* Luckily, I’m very organized and know my way around the scene quite well… Sierra is still getting used to things. We try to do a lot ourselves, but we also have a lot of help from our managers, booking agents, and our label doing things behind the curtains that we couldn’t even begin to understand or manage without them.
DR: You’re both musicians outside of Ocie Elliott — how do you determine what’s an Ocie Elliott piece and what might work better under another banner?
JM: For some reason it’s not really that much of a challenge because it seems perfectly natural now what song works with which project. With Ocie Elliott, melody and harmony are probably the most important aspects of the songs, and so we tend to give these aspects the most attention when writing. This quickly sets the songs apart as ‘Ocie Elliott’ songs, as opposed to ‘Sierra Lundy’ or ‘Jon and Roy’ tunes. Also, nowadays we will start out with the intention of writing an Ocie song right off the bat. That being said, there have been a handful of songs that have come about now from Sierra just messing around on the piano or keyboard and me saying, ‘Hey, that’s cool! Let’s make that into a song!’
DR: Your new album, We Fall In, is set to be released on February 8. Can you speak a little bit about how the album came together and what it means to you?
JM: We Fall In came about pretty quickly. We had decided in late 2017 that we wanted to do another recording and we had a producer who had contacted us that wanted to work on it. So, we set a goal of recording – I think in April – because this was his timeline. This actually fell through, but because of this goal, we set about writing and working on new material in January of 2018. With the exception of one song, every song on We Fall In was written between January and early April, which was when we recorded. This album definitely means a lot to us. It feels like a natural progression from our EP, which was done in a one-day session. We feel really good about how it turned out.
DR: Is there something unique about Victoria when compared to other cities you’ve experienced?
JM: I think there is. It definitely has a different flavour than most Canadian cities and architecturally it is very cool. There is also A LOT of good beer which makes it unique for its size — we both love IPA’s. *laugh* The abundant access to the ocean and woods definitely also makes Victoria unique. We live in James Bay and it’s incredible that even on the busiest summer day you can still go down to Dallas Road and find a quiet spot to sit by the water.
DR: What are you listening to right now?
JM: We both are listening to a lot of older music, or at least music released before the present day. Some of our favourites are J.J. Cale, Leonard Cohen, Dire Straits, Simon & Garfunkel, and Gillian Welch (especially her first two albums). I have also been enjoying some newer bands (Bas, Big Thief, Rainbow Kitten Surprise, Gregory Alan Isakov, and Saba). Sierra has been listening to Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin, Kurt Vile, Charlotte Cardin, Tame Impala, and Parov Stelar.
You can hear Ocie Elliott featured all month long on The Zone @ 91.3. We Fall In is available February 8 and their album release show is February 10 at Upstairs. Rocktographers is proud to be a headlining supporter of The Zone’s Band of the Month program.