30. July 2017 By Walter Price 0

Billy Momo Says: Ordinary Men

Ordinary men this week with Billy Momo #23.

I don’t know how much you guys know about Billy Momo and our albums. But we are actually celebrating our 10 year anniversary this summer. I thought I’d tell you where it all began and about our first album, Ordinary Men.

The title comes from me and Orren having toured for what felt like forever with other artists and groups. An endless streak of airports, buses, hotels and backstage areas. Life on the road is fun, super fun! Don’t get me wrong here. But it is a strange world that can be quite disconnected from real life.

And there came a point when we just felt that we wanted something real and closer to what we really were. Be a part of real life with our real friends and family. So that is why we went home, started Billy Momo and named the first album Ordinary Men.

But we took our time finding what we wanted to do. We wouldn’t rush this. We started writing songs together in 2007. But we didn’t release our first album until 2011. It wasn’t 4 years of constant recording. We were going through everyday life at the same time. I opened a bar with Preacher Man and had a daughter. Orren met his future wife and was doing his thing. Like we sing on the track Billy Slomo. “We’re coming up slow, ’cause we’ve got time to grow”.

It all began with us packing a car with instruments and going to a house in the woods for a few days. We didn’t really have a plan. We just knew we would write something. Not sure what. The first song we came up with was Come my way. And that kind of set the course for where we wanted to go.

I think we wrote like 10-15 songs that weekend. We really wanted to do everything ourselves. Write everything, play all the instruments and record it and mix it. But our knowledge of studio recording back then was modest, to say the least. So after a while, we realized that we needed some help. My brother-in-law had a studio and we had worked with him before in other bands, so he was an obvious choice. You probably know him as The Head (Oscar Harryson), electric guitarist in Billy Momo by the way.

And as he began listening to what we had recorded it became obvious that not everything we had recorded was as good as it should be. So we added auxiliary players on a few of the tracks. Most of the guest musicians we found through the bar. Some of them played at the bar. Some of them just got drunk there. And most of them are now full members of Billy Momo.

More Billy Momo wisdom at The GTC archive

The music publishing company Hype Music found our album 2 years after its first release and they wanted to help us out. So we re-released the album through Hype and MTV Networks in 2013 with a bonus track, They fuck you at the crossroads. And that is probably when we started realizing that this was something that maybe other people would want to hear and not just something we did for our own creative pleasure. So from there on we kind of stopped playing with other people and started really focusing on Billy Momo. It was a slow process getting that first album out of our system. But that process really laid the foundation for what we are today.