Omaha indie rock band Uh Oh have been performing together for nearly 12 years.
While they don’t have any illusions of making it on a grand scale at this point, members have a friendship and love of making music together that keeps them writing, playing live shows and putting out albums. That friendship and writing music together has never been more important as when they put together their new album “In the Eye of the City,” which is, in part, about vocalist and guitarist Joe Champion going through a breakup.
The band will release the album at Slowdown on Aug. 7 with Tom Bartolomei Band and Kethro. The full band talked about the upcoming album, dived into some of the tracks and talked about their future goals.
The band released the song “Right on Time” as the first single to announce the album. It serves as a set up for the album.
“That one is a statement for the whole album in some ways,” Champion said, “It’s the first track on the album. The album as a whole is a lot about going through stages of grief after my long term releastionship/marriage ended, so that song is about the people who helped me get through it and the fact that I was able to stay afloat because of all the people who have always supported and have kept me out of the blues as much as possible. So it is a tribute song to friendship and trying to give weight to the lighter side of things in the midst of a lot of really difficult things.”
There are other topics represented on the album, such as the song “Shelterbelt,” which was written by vocalist and guitarist Mari Crisler and mostly sung by her as well.
“I started writing that when Donald Trump was reelected and was really mad and I was getting kind of apathetic, and I was like man like I could just sit here and watch TV and all the bad news or I can go be in nature and find some solace in the earth, and also it’s about Charlie Kirk and how you can be a bad guy and have bad people following you,” Crisler said.
Drummer Jay Jacobson shared his take on their song “Barely Dreaming.”
“I think that song is the most easy listening song, and that would be an enjoyable song that would come on the radio right next to Sugar Ray and “Game of Love” from Santana,” he explained. “That song fits right in the middle I think, something that could be played at the pool in the summertime. We all have our favorite songs on the album, it is like comparing apples to oranges, pears to grapes, they all have their own good parts. I just vibe with that one. That one resonates with me. It feels good. That one kind of turned out, me and Mari kind of doing all of the vocals throughout the whole song together, we are almost picturing it as a late ’80s early ’90s hip-hop jam too. It turned into a bouncy fun kind of song. It’s one that could have fit in, in the 90s radio era.”
When listening to In The Eye of the City, the song “Restless” has a different vibe for the band.
“That one, I think it is a little bit of a mood shift, like right off the bat it (the album) starts off with ‘Right On Time,’ it has a certain type of rhythm and drive to it and then ‘Restless’ comes in and gives it a dark and new wave type of sound,” Champion said. “On the album it sets the tone. We have tried to expand our sound a little bit into a little more synth type of stuff, a little more new wavey. That one again is sort of trying to capture a certain mood of things I was trying to go through at the time. I was feeling extremely restless and still do all the time, and it’s just trying to capture the mood of trying to find my way through it. A lot of what I have been up to over the past year when writing was a lot of walking around the streets in the middle of the night, and kind of like neon lights-visually, that type of vibe of feeling lost and having that little bit of colder and emptier feeling sometimes. These synths and the tones we are able to find kind of feels that way to me. We like to play around with stuff and we are demoing and trying out new instruments, and this time around it just seemed like a lot more of the electronic stuff stayed in the mixes and captured a certain kind of mood we were going for.”
When it comes to the track that stands out for Champion, he said it’s “We’re Alive,” the closing track.
“Like I mentioned, this whole album revolves a little bit around the end of a relationship and trying to feel everything in the moment and look for the way through it and just massive massive life changes that have happened to me in the last year, and that song is the acceptance part of the album,” he said. “It’s after everything I have gone through and the same for the rest of the band, we have all had crazy things happen to us over the past year, things that are hard to get through and that song was the last one that we wrote. Mari and I collaborated on the lyrics and stuff and it just feels like the last giant part of the storm that you have to get through to get to the end of it.”
The band members have every intention of continuing on, and their goals are relatively simple. Band co-founder and bassist Erik Trent said the main goal is to keep playing and having fun.
“We are all, in the local music scene, older and probably not trying to make it outside of Omaha really, but just having fun with the band and putting out music,” he said.
Jacobson has a more specific goal.
“I think being a musician in Omaha, basically the ceiling is playing at Stir Concert Cove, if I can play Stir Concert Cove I can die happy, so if you can send that to Stir and we can open up for someone that is pretty good, or even pretty bad,” Jacobson said. “We will open up for bad people as long as they are not nasty people.”
“For me the goal is to always just have people give us a shot and give our music a listen” Champion added. “That is a challenge in itself, we have no false dreams of making it big, or making a lot of money off of it, but we care a lot about what we do, and we are going to go forever, and if we can get people to hear what we are doing and hopefully get some kind of emotion out of it and connect with people in that type of way, that is always my main goal.”