Last week, The Argus’ own B.J. Lillis ’12, the man behind the weekly comics section, revealed himself as Orkinpod, the anonymous Wesleyan pop experimenter who released two LPs last year. He’s just released his newest album “Boardwalking,” a collection of tunes as gloriously surreal as his Feet People strips. Lillis demystified Orkinpod to The Argus, discussed his motivation for the album, his middle-school obsession, and his fascination with The Beach Boys.
Argus: You just released your second album as Orkinpod. What was the conception behind it?
B.J. Lillis: Conception? I don’t know. It definitely was very much an “I’m gonna make an album” feeling. Like, I sat down, wrote a list of the songs that I had and went through my notebooks, but there’s no overriding concept or anything behind it. There’s a lot of things that got left off because they didn’t feel right, I couldn’t sing anymore, or that just weren’t in my range.
A: Is the album a compilation of songs that you’ve written throughout your time at Wes, or throughout your entire life?
BJL: Throughout my life, actually. I’ve been recording things since like ninth grade of high school. Things pile up. So once I decided to make an album, at first I thought, “I’ll write songs and make an album,” but then I started going through all these old tapes and things that I had lying around.
A: Why did you choose to put out the album now?
BJL: That’s a good question. I just did. I don’t know. I don’t think it was so much like, “I’m gonna make an album now. I’m gonna show it to people.” I didn’t really expect to show it to people. I’ve made albums before, and I’ve shown them to a few people. I’ve shown my friends. The biggest thing that changed with this one is that people actually liked it. I showed it to a friend, and he was like, “BJ, this is really good.” I put a link on my Facebook page and a friend was like, “Where can I buy this?” I kind of guess that’s why I’m here: because people were like, “You should show this to more people.”
A: What’s your instrument of choice?
BJL: I’m first and foremost a guitarist. That’s what I’ve always been more focused on. Since I came to Wes, I’m actually getting worse at guitar. I don’t practice anymore. I don’t sit down and try to learn new things. I’m slowly forgetting how to do things I used to know how to do. I play a lot of piano. I play everything on the album, so it’s all layered. The thing that’s most fun is that I have this keyboard—it’s not mine. I don’t know anything about keyboards. It’s my little sister’s. But I was at home and it was there and I was like, “Yeah, I can make helicopter sounds” and like, “Ooh harpsichord setting,” and playing around with that.
A: Why did you start writing music?
BJL: Do you know the song “Layla” by Eric Clapton? When I was in middle school, I loved, loved that song. It must have been sixth grade and at the end…have you ever heard of Dwayne Allman? He was the guitarist for the Allman Brothers Band. They wrote “Rambling Man” and a lot of southern rock. He plays on “Layla” and he plays slide guitar. So there’s this whole coda to the song, which was actually written by the drummer for the band at the time, Jim Gordon. He’s kind of a storied musical character too, because he played as a session musician in the sixties on records like “Pet Sounds” by The Beach Boys. He actually went crazy and killed his mother with an axe. But before going crazy and killing his mother with an axe, he wrote this piano coda, and then Dwayne Allman played slide guitar on it. I was listening to it as a sixth grader and I thought that the slide guitar was strings. I thought there was an orchestra, but then I found out it’s a slide guitar. So, I became fixated on the notion of learning how to play slide guitar. You can’t learn to play slide guitar without learning how to play guitar. Somewhere along that process I guess I just got totally bitten by the music-making bug.
A: Would you say that Clapton’s era and style of music heavily influenced you?
BJL: No, not at all. As a sixth grader I loved that song, but my main influence, the main thing I listen to actually, is The Beach Boys. Go ask my friends how often I talk about The Beach Boys–they’ll make shifty eyes. I love The Beach Boys. I listen to The Beach Boys every day, I read about The Beach Boys, I go on Beach Boys message boards to talk about the different things people argue about about The Beach Boys, so a lot of my influences are really obscure Beach Boys songs. I listen to Beach Boy sessions, which I think is something that if I ever do when someone else is within earshot they kind of think, “What is going on?” The way a Beach Boys session works is that they’d get all the musicians in one room and they’d just keep playing the song until they got it right. They’d roll tape the whole time in case they got something good that they wanted to keep. They’d have four tracks, with these huge tape machines, and they’d bounce it all down to one track. Then, they’d have like three tracks and they’d all gather around one microphone. You can get bootlegs, which are like three hours of them trying to work out how to play one song. They play it over and over again, and you can hear it change and evolve. You can hear Brian Wilson giving people their parts and telling them what to do, and you can hear them layering on the vocals. I listen to a lot of that kind of thing, it’s kind of like hearing music grow. That’s kind of where a lot of my inspiration comes from musically, I guess.
A: You’re the Editor of the Comics section with The Argus, how do you like that?
BJL: I like being Comics Editor. I really do, I swear. Draw comics! Anyone reading this or listening to this, just draw comics. I don’t care if it’s funny, I don’t care if it’s good, just send them to me. Whatever I don’t get submitted, I just stay up the night before drawing, and then you look at the comics page and it’s mostly me. On the one hand, it’s like kind of awesome. I have the whole page of the newspaper I can pretty much do whatever I want with. I can draw silly pictures. I can draw serious pictures, though I don’t do that very often. but, it’s also kind of like, “What am I doing with my college career?”
A: Why comics?
BJL: I don’t know. I like Calvin and Hobbes. Sophomore year, I was living in the Butts my first semester. I wasn’t very happy. I moved out of the Butts my second semester and met a bunch of awesome people who graduated. I mean, I liked the Butts as a freshman, but it didn’t cut it for me as a sophomore. So I was sitting in my room and doing my homework and reading The Argus, because I was that kid who always read The Argus, the kid who was at Usdan, reading The Argus alone at the little round table. I was like, “I could draw better comics than this!” The person who was Comics Editor then had the same problem I have now: not enough people submit, so they just draw silly things. There was this one day where there was just this whole page that was a comic about how people should submit comics. It looked like he had done it in about 2 minutes, and I was like, “I can do better than that.” Then it just sucked me in. One year The Argus did t-shirts. They were gonna say, “It’s a trap.” The Argus…it’s like a Venus Fly Trap. You hover around and think, “Oh, this would look good on my resume” and its just like [clap].
A: Do you plan to do anything with drawing or music?
BJL: Drawing…well I guess if someone offered me a job drawing things I would take it. I don’t expect that to happen. The Internet has basically killed all those jobs that photography didn’t. For music, I guess it’s the same thing. At this point if someone was like, “Come be a songwriter in Los Angeles! Come write songs for Britney Spears!” I wouldn’t say no, but I’m not gonna push for it. But when I came to Wesleyan I consciously said, “I’m not gonna take music classes. I am not gonna start a band. I am not gonna get involved in the music scene.” I like drawing and music and writing and reading, and all of these things are being folded into Wes. I’m getting grades on my writing, and I’m taking painting classes, so music is in its own corner. I’m not gonna get graded on it. I’m not gonna get judged for it. I’m just gonna do it on my own in my room. I’ve had that attitude until the beginning of this year when I was like, “Hey here’s an awesome music scene. I should get involved.” But, I mean, who knows if I will.
A: Do you have any plans for the future?
BJL: Like big picture plans? Not thinking about the future. Not thinking about the future. Not finding a job. Not taking my resume to the CRC to be looked at. I don’t want to graduate. I want to stay at Wesleyan. I want to keep taking history classes and fooling around.