interview

[Album] The O'My's: "A Humble Masterpiece"

The O'My's have been a mainstay around the Chicago music scene for six years now. In that time they have done everything from shows to hip-hop production, and last Friday celebrated their latest album, A Humble Masterpiece,  at a raucous release party at Subterranean and today on Ruby Hornet and iTunes. The core duo of Maceo Haymes and Nick Hennessy provide the backbone for the cross-genre group that blends the sounds better than anyone in the Midwest. I was able to catch up with Maceo for a few questions the other night, read more and listen to the full stream of the album below.

Jake: Tell me about putting together A Humble Masterpiece?

Maceo: The album was recorded over a year and some months, some of which is recorded with Blended Babies, a good portion was recorded at our own house. It was a pretty interesting process we went through  a lot of different phases of what we were trying to do and deciding if we wanted to do a certain sound and then just saying fuck it and make it and figure out what songs, so as of right now we still have like eight songs that are already recorded.

Jake: Does that mean we can expect another release soon?

Maceo: More so we just have them. We're just sitting on tons of fucking music, not a bad thing. It's kind of hard, it's like sitting on your hands.

Jake: Is it a quality control thing or just waiting?

Maceo: It's less about quality control. All the other songs are songs that I think are great but they didn't make it to the album because once we got the thirty-some odd songs we had to work with and then cut down, especially when putting together an album, you try to put together a sort of cohesive element or sound. That was mostly the reason for putting those eleven songs on the album and now we're figuring out what to do with the other ones. Mostly because we just want to get them out, you know? I'm not afraid that that was all of our creative juices, I just want to put it out so it's relevant, relevant to me personally. Just get it done and then I can move on.

Jake: Tell me about the production side of things with The O'My's.

Maceo: We've been doing production, we collaborate with a lot of different groups in the city, a lot of rappers and all different sorts of musicians, singers. For us it just made sense. To A: collaborate with them, but also because we make our own music and it's all live instruments and we have a sort of sound, producing for them has been interesting. We sort of stepped away from calling it The O'My's on the production side, just because it's terribly confusing, like 'these guys make rap music too?' It's been cool, the summer especially was really fucking awesome because we have a home studio and that's where we record everything and so the amount of talented people that were coming in from all around the city was a really cool thing to be a part of, I felt blessed to be a part of that.

Jake: Do you feel as though being in Chicago, eventually working with hip hop is inevitable?

Maceo: I don't think it's inevitable for everybody. It depends on the type of music you make and also the community you're a part of or connected to. Like, me and Nicholas are both super hip hop heads since the beginning, since before I sang or did any of that stuff. I've always been involved in hip hop, whether it was break dancing, DJ'ing, producing Nick threw graffiti. So in terms of who we're friends with in the scene, we're definitely way more close with the hip-hop community Lots of the live music scene in Chicago, we definitely have connections there but our roots are in hip-hop, at least community-wise.

Jake: What's next for The O'My's now that the album is out in the world.

Maceo: Next is gigging. Now that the album is done we're going to do a couple shows in the city but also go out east and west coasts. We've got a little East coast tour at the beginning of December and then probably West coast beginning of the year. Just gonna gig around with the album. The past year we've been gigging, but our focus hasn't been on performing, it's been on mostly just recording. Live shows are an integral part of our sound. What made the release show so fun for us was being able to play all these songs that we'd recorded with the band because most of the recordings, the band wasn't all there at the time. Different members of the band had different relationships with the album. It's cool to transfer that sound and make it something live. The project then takes on a whole other life, which is a lot of fun.

by Jake Krzeczowski