Indie folk band Oliver Hazard recently brought their down-to-earth spirit and love of music to Boston. The band, made up of Michael Belazis, Griffin McCulloch and Devin East, opened for The 502s at the Royale on Feb. 26. In an email to the Daily, Belazis related the band’s origin story, process of songwriting and thoughts on all things music.
The founding of Oliver Hazard reads like a storybook. The band formed when Belazis was visiting his childhood hometown of Waterville, Ohio, where he met up with a few old friends. Throughout the course of a week they wrote some tunes and fortunately won a Facebook raffle for studio time to record one free song. They entered the studio on March 30, 2017, and instead of focusing on producing a single, they used the time to play straight through 10 of their songs live to create a debut album.
“This album was created by 3 friends, to be performed for friends,” Belazis wrote. “We never thought it would become bigger than that.”
Since that fateful day, the band has been steadily growing while keeping its small-town, authentic quality. Now it has over 1.4 million Spotify listeners, has toured with bands such as America, Mt. Joy and The 502s and played at musical festivals like Bonnaroo, Mountain Jam and Americanafest.
As its community has grown, maintaining a personalized connection with its audience remains important. In 2018 Oliver Hazard started the Living Room Tour, where it performed in over 60 living rooms across the United States.
“You’d be surprised how similar it is performing for 30 people in a living room and performing for 1000 people in a theatre,” Belazis wrote. “In a way, the living room shows prepare you to talk to a massive crowd in a very calm, friendly, and familiar way. It makes the room feel a lot smaller and less intimidating. I never thought those shows would translate so well into the larger venues.”
Even after regularly playing for 1,000-person venues, the band’s small-town beginnings persist as an integral part of their identity. The band’s name comes from the historical figure Oliver Hazard Perry, who has a lot of significance on Lake Erie.
“We wanted to choose a name that had a local tie to where we grew up, so we borrowed his first and middle name,” Belazis wrote.
Today, the band continues to honor its roots by hosting “Oliver Hazard Day,” an annual music festival in the band’s hometown of Waterville, Ohio. Originally an event suggested to the band by the mayor of Waterville, it has become important in allowing the band to include the city in its project. As it continues to grow, the band hopes to bring more great musicians who would normally ignore Waterville. In correspondence with the Daily, Oliver Hazard announced Saturday, Aug. 12 as the date for Oliver Hazard Day 2023.
From a spectator’s perspective, the group is filled with humanity, passion and love, which clearly translate to their music. The highlight of their sound is tight vocal harmonies shared between the three of them aided by traditional folk song structure — major key fingerpicking and plagal cadences galore. Belazis explained this distinctive style of singing.
“When we first got together as a band, that was one of the defining features we noticed as well,” Belazis wrote. “We could all sing in unison and in harmony. That was a happy mistake/coincidence. … We definitely want to continue driving that quality into more of our upcoming songs.”
Much like singing, songwriting is a communal process for the band.
“Usually we will bring a ‘song’ to the writing table, whether it be a verse or chorus, or both,” Belazis wrote. “Then we will all try to collaborate on where we each think the song could evolve into.”
A specific example of the band’s creative process can be seen in the creation of its newest single, “Ballerina” (2023).
“I walked into the room one day after practice and I heard Devin playing a beautiful guitar riff. I immediately told him I loved it, I sat down and the song fell out of us,” Belazis wrote. “Devin had some beautiful and relatable verses prepared. It almost sounded like his guitar was dancing, so I came up with the Ballerina chorus.”
Such a collaborative, community-oriented approach helps to create an earnest, heartwarming feeling in the band’s music. While this can easily be heard on recordings, Oliver Hazard is at its best live, where real human connections are made. Even though Oliver Hazard opened for The 502s, its performance was easily the highlight of the night at the Royale. When placed next to the candor and passion of Oliver Hazard, the flashy energy of The 502s could not distract from its disappointing musical performance marked by out-of-tune saxophone playing and mediocre singing. In contrast, Oliver Hazard maintained cohesive, effortless vocal harmony throughout while connecting with a room of hundreds as if the band was singing to a living room of 30.
