Interview with Oova Obra in Jib, an Online Music Zine

It's not True, Those Rumors about Sexuality in the Studio

Jib: Your album "Metastasis" has debuted in the number one spot, which is an incredible thing, really. Congratulations, by the way. Are you, like, happy with the album?

Oova: No. Oh, I don't know. Yes. However you want. If you have this great load of pain you drag around all day and getting high on drugs or whatever and when you confront yourself with yoga you try to maintain your performance at a certain level.

Jib: How does that affect your music?

Obra: The money's nice (laughs).

Oova: We lived in our car when I was little and our father would hunt all through the night, shining a light up in the trees. He'd have his gun ready. I slept on a bed in the back, in the trunk of the car sorta. He would play Eagles tapes from the seventies and we would sing along as loud as we could around the campfire. Just driving down the road and the gun and all sticking out the window.

Jib: You're going back into the studio at the end of the year for another album?

Obra: It's fantastic. It's beautiful, you know, because we could grow as the people we are and just experiment and just feel the pain we carry around. So it's so happy and so fundamental and just so, so to get back into the studio. You're only really alive if you're in there in the booth the headphones vibing you and a big glass of scotch.

Oova: Yeah, glass of Stoly right out of the freezer.

Jib: You're back to writing? Is that right?

Oova: You just have to keep on doing what you're doing because it's what you've been doing all this time and you, like, accept it as what you do and you just keep on. You can say to yourself, "I'm not doing drugs so my music's different." But it (the music) has changed over time whether we were out of our minds and trashing a motel room or not doing drugs and just evolving. It's important to evolve. I don't try to pin it to that when you're high on something all the time.

Obra: Everything in life is about sleazy motel rooms, old people driving the wrong way on the highway and the natural aesthetics of the '50s and film noir with Bette Davis and Gary Cooper. It's what people do in sleazy motels and about regrets and longing and finding a jar of pickle relish in the supermarket and dumping it out on the carpet.

Jib: So you've moved beyond the motel room phase of your music?

Oova: Yeah, mostly. But we still have to pay a damage deposit up front.

Obra: Not the chicks, dude. We haven't moved beyond the chicks (laughs).

Jib: Any truth to the stories about working in the nude in the studio?

Oova & Obra: (Laughter)

Obra: Where'd you hear that (laughs)? Tube socks, right?

Oova: The truth is when you remove the drugs the music starts getting too overproduced and overcomplicated and you either want to make it simple or go back to being out of your mind. If you don't have music to bring an inner peace, an inner strength, you'd probably be kooky and really messed up. So, yeah, we slip our clothes off once in a while, when the vibes're right.

Obra: But it's not, like, we jerk off, you know. That's not true. Not true

Jib: I've heard talk of a world tour.

Oova: I'm not scared of getting old. I'm 24 next month. That's cool. I can get old. I can die. I look forward to dying. With dignity. How much can it hurt? Dying with some scotch. I like the idea of marijuana as a medicine. As a medicine, not a drug. Think what they could do if they made smack into a medicine.

Jib: Thanks a lot.

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