Okey Dokey is an apt name for a project defined more by a can-do spirit than any strict adherence to a single sound or practice. When singer-songwriter-bassist Aaron Martin and guitarist Johny Fisher founded the band in 2016, the main objective was to collaborate with as many other people as possible.
“You see it a lot in hip-hop, or outlaw country — talking about friends in the lyrics, or handing a bridge over to someone else to write,” Martin tells the Scene. “But it’s something rock bands don’t do enough.”
Fisher, a Texan, and Martin, a Putnam County native, have been friends for more than a decade. Martin came to Nashville to pursue visual art and still chiefly identifies as an illustrator and painter. But when Fisher’s previous group, the psychedelic-pop sextet Sol Cat, had an opening on bass, Fisher urged Martin to give it a shot, and he ended up doing a yearlong stint in the band. Sol Cat enjoyed a solid run from 2012 to 2015 but was ultimately done in by a case of too many cooks. There were the goals of the six members, which didn’t always overlap, and then there was advice from a wide variety of people who took an interest in what Sol Cat was up to. As Martin says, “When we were younger, we listened to a lot of things we were told.”
Those giving the band pointers might consider the idea of enlisting six separate individuals to help produce an album to be outlandish — and based on how Sol Cat ended, you might expect the same of Okey Dokey. But that’s exactly what they did for Once Upon One Time, their third LP, out Oct. 23. The album is the group’s first with a trio at its core, counting the recent addition of multi-instrumentalist and fellow Sol Cat alum Jeremy Clark, and first since signing with Park the Van, the label that brought Philly retro-pop greats Dr. Dog to the wider world.
But not just anybody got behind the boards for Once Upon One Time. The record’s mixing and co-production credits are a who’s-who of indie heavyweights, with contributions from members of My Morning Jacket, Grizzly Bear and The Shins. The assembled brain trust runs Okey Dokey’s adventuresome psych-pop through an array of filters, incorporating stacked multi-part harmonies (“Feel Brand New”), bold symphonic instrumentation (“Throw Me a Bone”) and gospel with a twinge of folk melancholia (“To Be Real”). “Oh, What a World,” not to be confused with the Kacey Musgraves song of the same name, offers up neo-soul ear candy. There’s an unapologetic T-Rex homage called “Big City Magic,” and MMJ six-stringer Carl Broemel contributes a rapturous guitar solo to “It’s Just You.” Across the LP’s dozen songs, there’s an intuitive simplicity to the writing and a spaciousness to the arrangements that lets the melodies shine. It’s clear the makers of this music savor the process as much as the outcome.
Early in 2019, Martin and Fisher issued the second Okey Dokey album Tell All Your Friend, which features cameos from fellow Nashvillians Rayland Baxter and Liz Cooper. Even before the release, though, the group began dropping collaborative singles, each of which features a different guest singer. At year’s end, the nine tracks were collected as Curio Cabinet I, an odds-and-sods spiritual cousin to The Beach Boys’ Party! or Yo La Tengo’s Fakebook, and the first in a series Martin and Fisher intend to continue between proper full-lengths. For the Curio tracks, they recruited from inside the local scene but also looked beyond it, spotlighting a motley mix of peers including veteran L.A.-via-Oxford, Miss., home recordist Dent May and Nari, a Californian living in Lexington, Ky., who also happens to be a Park the Van signee. Okey Dokey recorded her song “I Really Want to Know” for the series.
“We met Nari on tour last year,” Martin explains. “She was giving us stick-and-poke tattoos and she was just like, ‘I wish I could be a musician’ … which is something I used to say for years, ‘I’m not a musician.’ But that’s bullshit. She sent us a song we thought was really great — and never would’ve written. We wanted to pay it forward.”
Martin points to a couple of sterling examples for Okey Dokey. There’s Parquet Courts (“a loud, wild punk group, but [whose] poignant statements on class and society you could put in a poetry book”) as well as Osees (formerly Thee Oh Sees, of whom Martin says, “I love how androgynous the fuzz they retch out of themselves is … it’s like cotton candy, but straight-up evil”). These groups have an insatiable drive to create — and commitment to never repeating themselves — that has proven sustainable over long, prolific careers.
When Okey Dokey came home early from a tour of Western states and provinces back in mid-March, they certainly didn’t anticipate still being sequestered in Nashville seven months later. But for Martin, the time away from the stage has been fruitful, in “trying to correct any kind of ego” as the creation of new work continues.
“In my mind, I feel like we, as a band, are going to accomplish a lot because we care about it. But [the pandemic] has also allowed a more humble appreciation of what we do. I don’t have time anymore to pat myself on the back when I write a song.”
