OLIVER HAZARD

A Conversation with Mike Belazis of Oliver Hazard

Interview and Photos by Tommy Moore

Oliver Hazard "Workingman's Folk" Single Artwork by Tommy Moore

Oliver Hazard is an indie folk band from Waterville, Ohio. Over the past few years, the trio has built a catalog of tunes that has fueled road trip playlist after road trip playlist. 

From the start, founding members Mike Belazis and Devin East were surrounded in the rich, wooded hills and cold rivers of Northern Ohio. Though the band’s still rooted there, their sound has expanded to landscape after landscape as they’ve steadily grown across the country.

We had the opportunity to hop in with the guys for a little over a week where we made our way from Austin across the desert to LA. After the fact, we sat back down with Mike to dive deeper into their Ohio roots, the band’s growth, and their upcoming record.

@olihazard

olihazard.com

Royel Otis Photographed by Georges Antoni

Tommy Moore: How’s the release of Wild Eyed Blue been?

Mike Belazis: It's going well. It's always hard to tell, but the response from the song seems to be bigger than any other song that we've put out in the last few years. It's hard to say that with analytics backing it up, but there's this feeling you get, this ethos that you can feel from the fans who hit you up about it that's really clear and convincing about how much this song is affecting people. We've been getting a lot of messages from folks who are on summer vacation somewhere, and they're saying the song’s been the soundtrack to their trip. It’s really cool to hear on our end. It's been super fun. That tour across the West Coast of the country that you were with us for, I think it really helped get it in the ears of all these people, encouraging everybody to sing it with us.

Tommy Moore: People seemed really receptive to it. Even from the first show to the last that I was at, it seemed like things were steadily building up.

Mike Belazis: That was really cool to see, having people want to know the lyrics before we release it.

“Haunted” was the first single of the new record, and then “Honey, I'm Hardly” which is kind of a sneaky one, was the second. That one's been a dark horse in the sense that it's getting the most streams a day. It's the most different song that I think we've ever put out. There’s a really heavy country vibe, and I don't think we've ever put anything out like that. Sometimes, as a band, when you cast a net like that, where you just throw out something that feels a little different than everything else you've put out, you can surprise yourself with how the audience receives it. So that was cool to see.

Oliver Hazard Photographed by Tommy Moore

Tommy Moore: It's like a cool way to kind of strike a new chord with a maybe slightly adjacent collection of people.

Mike Belazis: Also that playlist that I just sent you for DAYBREAK is pretty much all country, too.

Tommy Moore: I hate saying it, but all mine are going that way, too. 

Looking at those three singles and the new record as a whole, and I know you guys are still working through that, but what's the general overall feel and trajectory of it?

Mike Belazis: I think our goal with this group of songs was to find a way to harken back to our roots and where we started the band. That was a very live and raw, almost unsure time. It's just hard to capture, and so even when we recorded a lot of these new songs that we're putting out, we would make mistakes in the recording process, but we would really urge each other to just be okay with making the mistake and leaving it. I think there's so much perfect, generated content and art out there right now, and I think having humanizing features in songs is really important. That was one of our goals, too, to make something that we're really proud of. Clean and well orchestrated, with that raw, human experience to blend it together.

"Sometimes, as a band, when you cast a net like that...you can surprise yourself with how the audience receives it."

Oliver Hazard Photographed by Tommy Moore

Tommy Moore: That's cool. I feel like everybody just wants something that feels personable, instead of cleaned up and perfect. That's already everywhere around us.

Mike Belazis: Definitely. I think that's one of the sonic themes for the record, and we'll definitely have that wrapped this year. I think that it won't be a full length record, but we're gonna release an EP. The teaser name for now, we're calling it Raindrop River. It's the name of the last single that's also going to come out with it. It's almost got this Paul Simon, Grateful Dead, Crosby, Stills and Nash feel to it, like the Beach Boys.

Tommy Moore: The title definitely fits with all of those four.

Mike Belazis: Yeah, and it's really playful. There's a lot of wild harmonies on it, and I think it's the most intense harmony orchestration that we've ever put together. The whole song jumps around with different vocal stuff is really neat. This is one of my favorite songs on the record.

"We started this band playing in living rooms around the country and inviting 35 friends to each living room, growing it 35 people at a time."

Oliver Hazard Photographed by Tommy Moore

Tommy Moore: I know you mentioned getting back to your roots and everything, can you talk a little bit about not necessarily the band's roots, but your roots to the outdoors, and where you come from in that realm? What’s the importance of the outdoors to you and your process, and the inspiration you're pulling from it in general?

Mike Belazis: For a while before the band started I was working for a company called Outward Bound, which is an outdoor education nonprofit. I would spend weeks taking students out on backpacking trips to the mountains. It was really off the grid.

Mentally, I was accomplishing things that felt bigger than myself. We were out there with these students, and if they could climb a mountain that they never thought they could, later on they could use that mindset in life. It was concrete things that they never thought they would be able to do. That was my life before we started the band. Then where we grew up is just this idyllic, beautiful, small town Midwestern vibe. This beautiful river runs through the whole place. There’s a lot of natural beauty that's associated with where we come from, and our community is very intertwined with that. I think all of our music, and the inspiration behind our music, plays off of that sense of place of where we come from. I think nature and community are one of the biggest pieces of the Oliver Hazard story. That's why we throw all of our Oliver Hazard Day and we try to get folks from all over the world. I think a lot of that is the glue to the whole project. 

"I think there's so much perfect, generated content and art out there right now, and I think having humanizing features in songs is really important."

Oliver Hazard Photographed by Tommy Moore

Tommy Moore: Can you talk more about Oliver Hazard Day, and what you've built it into what your hopes are for that?

Mike Belazis: We started it in 2018, which is pretty much when we started touring and started the Oliver Hazard project. We started it as a means to raise money. We wanted to work with the city on something where we could fundraise as a band. When we first started the band, we met with the mayor of Waterville and asked her if we could do a T-shirt that was co branded. We were thinking really small, and she was way smarter than us. She asked us, “Why don’t you just throw a concert in the middle of the road?” 

We're like, “We can just go downtown and block the street off? And they're like, “Oh, yeah.” So we built our own stage that year and invited two bands that were buddies of ours from the local town to open up for us. We invited all of our friends, a couple food trucks, and all of a sudden, we're looking around and it felt like a music festival. So we called it Oliver Hazard Day. The next year, 2019, we approached it as a music festival. We got a bigger stage and more food trucks. We asked local businesses to be vendors, and then we started inviting bands that were actually legit, emerging artists. We had Daniel Donato and our buddies the Michigan Rattlers. From there, it started to grow in the sense that we're envisioning it as something entirely different. Through the years, it's pretty amazing to see what it's become. I think as we've grown the festival. It's not like more and more people are coming, we probably have a plateau in the amount of people, but the quality of fans is changing. People are coming because they want to be a part of Oliver Hazard Day and they want to see Waterville, Ohio. There's no fairweather fans anymore. Three years ago, we had rain from doors to close. 50 degrees and raining for seven hours straight. We didn’t think anyone would come, and literally over 1000 people showed up in ponchos and did the rain all day for the whole festival. I think that is the spirit of the festival.

Oliver Hazard Photographed by Tommy Moore

Tommy Moore: Myself, being a small town Midwest boy, too, it's cool to still have that connection to your hometown. And also having the actual community connection, rather than just saying you're from there popping in every once awhile. Actually doing something that's bringing everybody together and incorporating all the local businesses. 

Mike Belazis: For sure. The thing about small towns is we just had a little more flexibility on the rules. A lot of times, they let you shut down the main road. It's pretty cool.

Tommy Moore: Outside of that and the new record, what are you dreaming up right now? What's coming down the pipeline and what are you hoping shows its face in the next few years?

Mike Belazis: Our main vision right now is to slowly walk towards selling more tickets and growing as a band nationally. We've spent so long growing our regional presence, and now we're jumping into questions like, “How can we grow our fan base and in the small towns like Oklahoma City and places we've never been to?” I think that is hard to quantify, but our vision for this project was like how do we create an Oliver Hazard Day moment in all these places all across the country? The way that the band started locally was very grassroots. We started this band playing in living rooms around the country and inviting 35 friends to each living room, growing it 35 people at a time. Even though that process might seem inefficient in the day and age where you could go viral on the internet in 30 seconds, it just feels like there's like a quality to the end result that we are proud of. There's this cultivation, it might feel old school, but I think it still applies in a day and age where things are very digital.

"There’s a lot of natural beauty that's associated with where we come from, and our community is very intertwined with that. I think all of our music, and the inspiration behind our music, plays off of that sense of place of where we come from."

Oliver Hazard Photographed by Tommy Moore

Oliver Hazard

Interview and Photos by Tommy Moore

Oliver Hazard is on tour throughout the US for the rest of the year, and is joined by some of our pals The Last Revel and Michigander along the way. You can find Oliver Hazard tour dates here.

Oliver Hazard just released their latest single, Workingman's Folk. You can stream it here.