Breathe Owl Breathe are, in this recent and frankly bizarre folk resurgence, a genuine diamond in the rough. Cleverer than their cleverest contemporaries and more sprightly than their genre would imply, the band mixes youthful whimsy with disarmingly complex instrumentals for wondrous results.
This Friday the band brings their starry-eyed charm back in full force to the Project Lodge for their third visit to Madison.
“It’s an awesome town,” Andréa Moreno-Beals, resident cellist, said of the city. “It’s great for me because I grew up in Ann Arbor, Mich. and I love it. They’re constantly being compared, both are university towns and they’ve got the same kind of culture.”
Folk music’s sudden resurgence amongst the college crowd (who would have ever thought The Tallest Man on Earth would be a powerhouse 10 years ago?) prompts the inevitable question; what’s it like to play a college town?
“There’s such a range, and it’s so different from region to region,” Moreno-Beals said. “But yeah, I would say it generally helps to play a college town because the young people come up.”
The band has recently set out across the country to push their latest release—a combination 7” vinyl and children’s book detailing the misadventures of various characters in the band’s traditionally off-kilter style.
“I’m still really excited about this,” Moreno-Beals said of the project, titled, “The Listeners/These Train Tracks.” “[Lead singer] Micah’s a real visual thinker, and he studied printmaking in college—in art school—and the idea just kind of came to him of these two stories. There’s a daytime story and a bed time story, and these great characters.”
It’s not purely an aesthetic thing, either. Breathe Owl Breathe most certainly have a message in mind for the children.
“Micah remembered having picture books that came with vinyls when he was a kid,” Moreno-Beals continued. “You know, they would make a ‘ding’ when you turned the page and everything. But since we’re a band and we make records, we’re excited to introduce little kids, like that person who might never know what [a record player] is, to what vinyls are.”
Though the project may be primarily aimed at children, the band has the utmost faith in the material. Moreno-Beals said they do not eschew any of their exotic vibes for an easy hit, as the jointly bizarre and involving tracks are quick to reveal.
“I’m just as excited about them [artistically] and musically as anything off our last full length,” she said. “We took them just as seriously.” The songs easily fit in among a catalog home to songs about Sabre Tooth Tigers and Sylvia Plath, so it is fair to say that the band has succeeded.
The band’s songwriting, a predominant part of the group’s appeal, takes heavy inspiration from the more whimsical of Aesop’s fables. A Magic Central highlight, “Dragon,” was concerned primarily with a pen pal exchange between the titular beast and a princess, and the considerably more upsetting notion of how to stop loving someone.
“Micah’s the one who writes all the lyrics,” Moreno-Beals explained. “He’s very inspired by stories and old folklore.”
Even the name of the band is indebted to a sort of magic.
“It comes from a dream Micah had that, as he described it, sounds like a Native American vision-quest kind of dream,” she said. “He says he doesn’t usually have that type of dream, so this was a really special one that stood out. He woke up and said ‘Breathe Owl Breathe.’ At that point we were just a duo, me and Micah, and we were looking for a name, and there it was.”
