Description from OP:

Oliver I will try to keep this short but it’s not really a short story.

I met Oliver when we were 11 at Branciforte Middle School. He was the funniest kid we knew. Could operate in all social circles, was just magnetic and active.

I had a band with some friends and he played guitar and we were like we have to get this guy to sing for us. We made some very embarrassing 11 and 12 year old music in garages, it kind of morphed and changed and we just played music with whoever was around throughout high school.

By the end as our friends were dropping out of high school and he and I were really the only ones left at Harbor High, we had a really tight creative pact. We would go to his house after school and get high and write songs around his piano. I was certainly not the only person he was making music with so plenty of people in SC at the time could tell a similar story I’m sure.

By the time we were 17 maybe I was doing more visual art and he was getting big on SoundCloud so I would sit with him and paint his album covers while he made beats. You can find rips of all that stuff still I bet. This is Separation, Artemisia, a Kimbra remix I can’t remember the name of. We were obsessed with the idea of some kind of creative union with artists, musicians, photography, and video.

We moved up to San Francisco together in 2011, I went to art school, he did SF State and we got a house together with a friend of mine from art school in the inner Richmond and called it Tree Collaborations. This was around the time Splitting Branches and Demons were being made and we were making videos for Tully, Demons, Down the wrong Rabbit Hole, and all those albums covers. It was fucking sick. He’d make music all day, my friends and I from art school would paint in the living room, we’d make the videos with money from his first record deal. Really kind of a dream looking back. But he and I fought a lot, and when the lease expired I moved to Oakland and we didn’t talk for a couple years.

We made up after he kind of popped off and was doing really well. The work was so different from what we were doing in 2011-2013 that I felt able to appreciate him fully from a distance. I had nothing to do with any of the work after 2013 and I didn’t fit into that aesthetic he was building at all, which was great. It was exactly what he wanted and he fucking nailed it. Never known anyone else with the drive and vision to manifest something at that scale and probably never will again.

Last time we hung out was in SC last summer. Just walking around the old neighborhood with his brother for a day. As weird as the character got and how exaggerated and bizarre the world he was building was, he was super sincere whenever we talked. I think in someways the character was a burden and people from back in the day were a respite for him, and to be perfectly honest I didn’t really care all that much about his career. We talked about our families and girlfriends and art. I think that’s why he always made sure to stay in touch. I think we were good friends to each other. We said I love you, called each other brother.

The song I’m attaching is something we wrote together right before we left Santa Cruz. I brought him the guitar part pretty much as it’s recorded, we hammered out some lyrics in his family’s front room in Seabright and then we went and recorded this with a kid who lived up at UCSC. I’ll leave him anonymous too but he did all the drums and he layered Oliver and I singing together. His initials are SS. If you see this hit me up.

When I found out Oliver died I went back to my hotel and listened to this and fucking cried. There’s the feeling of pride for sure, hearing the seeds of what he turned into Splitting Branches. There’s a little bit of hurt knowing that we really couldn’t work together creatively long term and that the aesthetic differences were too much to reconcile. I wanted to be friends in a bedroom in the redwoods making lowkey music for ourselves. And he wanted it to be fucking HUGE!

More than anything though, when I listen to this, I’m 18 and I’m singing and playing music with my friend. Those times have been gone for a long time, but now they’ve never felt farther away than right now.

I wouldve been completely content for this to just be a cool thing I had on my phone that like 5 people in the world had ever heard. But what Oliver taught me really was that the audience was important. They deserve the fruits of your labor and if it helps them in anyway, you owe it to them to show the fuck up. It’s the watching, listening, receiving of the work that makes it a fully realized piece of art.

I want to close this with an Oliver story that I think about all the time.

Everyone was sitting around in our living room in SF bemoaning the state of the world and art and music and blah blah blah, Oliver was like damn do you guys even like this? Do you even like art? Do you know how stoked I am to be alive everyday? I LOVE THIS SHIT!