Orange Fight has everything it takes to become successful: they have the passion, the talent, scheduled future performances and to top it off, the majority of them have PhD’s.
Whitman’s very own all-faculty band on campus, Orange Fight, is a group to keep an eye on through the coming years. With a brand-new independent album on the shelves and two shows in the works, they are quickly establishing themselves as recording artists.
The band itself consists of Director of Institutional Research Neal Christopherson, his wife and Associate Professor of Sociology Michelle Janning, Assistant Professor of History John Cotts, Associate Professor of Psychology Matthew Prull and Peterson Endowed Chair of Social Sciences Keith Farrington.
The songs on the album are reminiscent of Bob Dylan, Cat Stevens and other classic rock artists. With Prull on the electric guitar, Cotts on the bass, Janning on the keyboard and Christopherson on the guitar and singing, the songs are an accumulation of great instrumentals and deep-voiced crooning.
The group, led by Christopherson, first started playing the songs on the new album this past summer, but they were initially recorded years ago.
You can add reverb, you can boost the treble or the middle tones…”
-Neal Christopherson, guitarist and vocals
“Most of [the songs] were already recorded. They were all written when I was in college. The oldest one on there is from about 1995. The most recent songs were written about four years ago,” said Christopherson.
When asked about the origin of the name of the band, Janning said it came from Christopherson’s brother.
“‘Orange Fight’ came from his brother, who brewed a home-brew beer and called it ‘Orange Fight’ and Neil liked the name,” said Janning. “Neil is from Southern California and his parents live on an acre of land that has an orange grove on it and he grew up with oranges as a central visual.”
The process of making an album independently, however, is a little tricky. Although the majority of the songs were already recorded in Christopherson and Janning’s ‘studio’ (their guest bedroom) on their digital recording device, they needed to go through the process of mixing and mastering. Mixing, according to Christopherson, is changing the levels of volume within the songs and mastering is cleaning up the quality of sound.
“You can add reverb, you can boost the bass or the treble or the middle tones so all that stuff goes into the mixing process and it’s fairly complicated,” said Christopherson.
The band ended up going to a studio over in Tri-cities and had them help with the mixing and mastering. After the process was done, they sent their audio to discmakers.com and had their CDs made. Last, but not least, came the cover art. Luckily for Christopherson, one of his college friends, Sally Carns, was the best in her field of graphic design for CD covers and had even won a Grammy in her line of work. With her help, they created a very professional citrus-themed cover with a picture of a soldier from WW2 throwing an inserted painting of an orange instead of a grenade.
The only job left to do was go around and give a few stores their CDs to put on their shelves. Hot Poop, Hastings and the Whitman bookstore now sell the self-titled album, but it will also become accessible on Itunes.
The group has two scheduled shows coming up: one on April 18 at Hot Poop with nine other local bands and the second at Merchants either the first or second week of May.
The members would like Whitman students to become interested in their music as well.
“[Whitman students] are on the pulse of the changing music scene and for Matt Coleman, the manager of Coffeehouse, to say that it sounded good for Whitman students? I guess that Whitman students being an audience would be a great thing,” said Janning.
