Great article from http://www.stereosubversion.com/ 1/29/08
If you listen to Wild Sweet Orange’s new five-song Whale EP, especially the opener “Wrestle with God”, it’s immediately obvious something spiritual is going on here. So we began by asking where lead singer Preston Lovinggood was at, spiritually.
“When you say, ‘There’s something spiritual going on,’ to that I say, ‘Well, of course!’” Lovinggood responds. “My brain operates just to believe there is something going on. That helps me to adapt to my environment better. Spiritually, where I think I’m at, that’s kind of a hard question for me to answer. I feel like I’m at a good place of, like, asking a lot of questions that I never asked, and being comfortable doubting things and being comfortable with believing things, too. And not being scared with not knowing all the answers.”
Wild Sweet Orange is from Alabama, and the act’s Southern upbringing can’t help but color its music.
“A lot of the songs that are on the EP and a lot of the songs that will be on the record, have a lot to do with where we grew up, and how we grew up in the South in the Bible Belt,” Lovinggood explains. “So, of course we’re writing songs kind of dealing with that. A lot of negative things came from, like, some conditioning and brainwashing. But I think a lot positive things came out of it as well. A lot of great art comes from struggle with these big questions.”
“A lot of great music has come from the South,” Lovinggood continues. “The blues and of course rock & roll came from the South. Chip [Kilpatrick, the band's drummer] is obsessed with Elvis and there’s not a time when I walk out on stage or I write a song that I don’t think about Johnny Cash or Elvis or Aretha Franklin.” [Aretha Franklin was actually from Michigan. But she made her best records in the South, so I'll give Lovinggood a little grace on that one]. I put it through a filter: Has it got enough soul in it for, like, a Black woman to sing? Is it cool enough for Johnny Cash?”
There’s an unintentionally funny video of Wild Sweet Orange on YouTube where a helplessly ill-informed TV host describes the band as a bluegrass act. Clearly, this TV personality had no inkling about Lovinggood’s soulful musical filtration system. Granted, there are country-ish elements running through the group’s work. But this is by no means a bluegrass band.
“I’ve always looked up to artists that can tap into all kinds of things, kind of like a mind, body, spirit.”“I think she didn’t know a thing about our band,” Lovinggood says in the woman’s defense. “I think it’s just rock music,” Lovinggood follows up, when asked what he really thinks his band sounds like. “We’re not trying to create some new music. You know what I’m saying? We like The Beach Boys. We like Tom Petty. We like Radiohead. We like rock music. We all grew up loving rock music, so I just think it’s just, like, a rock band. I think it’s just rock and roll.”
Expect to hear more of Wild Sweet Orange’s hesitantly spiritual take on rock and roll when the group releases its upcoming full-length. “I think it’s gonna be called, We Have Cause To Be Uneasy,” Lovinggood explains. “It’s the first songs that I’ve written, so a lot of it’s really autobiographical about just things I experienced when I was younger. It’s just kind of the basic first record for a new band. We’ve all been playing together since we were in grade school, but we kind of parted ways for a long time, and then joined back together and started really enjoying playing music together again.”
“I just became obsessed with the suburbs and with this idea of just the ordinary and what lies behind the surface and this whole idea of the suburbs is a kind of denial in some way, or escapism from different people,” he continues. “And just being really confused by that and just feeling kind of ostracized in such a big group of people who are all the same and never really feeling a part of what was going on. It’s about growing up and having certain ideals kind of shoved down your face, but being able to adapt and be creative and be poetic and still enjoy yourself. That’s the struggle. I think the record is really confused. I think the lyrics are confused. I think it’s coming from a place of trying get to a place where I can enjoy myself, without having to feel bad about it for some weird reason, and stuff like that.”
When I first heard the band name, Wild Sweet Orange, it struck me as a really great Van Morrison song title – a song that Irish icon has yet to write. It’s not a Morrison song name, by the way. But I’d buy it if Van The Man put out a tune under this moniker. Although Morrison also has nothing to do with the naming of the group, Lovinggood is nevertheless a Morrison admirer.
“I love Van Morrison!” Lovinggood enthuses. “He’s done a really good job writing songs, like a lot of my heroes. Like John Lennon or Marvin Gaye. When I think about Van Morrison, Marvin Gaye, and John Lennon, it is cool because I think their songs are all really spiritual, but they all really have this sexiness to them as well. And, like – especially Marvin Gaye and John Lennon – kind of political. It’s kind of like U2 in a way, as well. I’ve always looked up to artists that can tap into all kinds of things, kind of like a mind, body, spirit.”
It’s easy to see a connection between Lovinggood’s own music, and the sounds of his heroes. Like these aforementioned greats, Lovinggood does a whole lot of soul searching when he writes songs like “Tilt,” where he wonders aloud about losing the spiritual ground he’s gained up to that point in his life. Oddly enough, Lovinggood did not discover some of these more organic, classic sounds until later in life, relatively speaking.
“I didn’t really grow up listening to a lot of music until probably four years ago” Lovinggood admits. “I listened to a lot of punk music, but that’s kind of a pious scene; when you listen to punk music that’s, like, all you listen to. [Then] I just started really getting into, like, all different kinds of music. But Van Morrison is something I’ve just gotten into over the last two years.”
A common denominator among the names John Lennon, Marvin Gaye, Van Morrison, and U2, is that all of these artists mix together the sexual, the spiritual, and the political. Society loves to divide and categorize these three highly charged topics, yet it’s beautifully hard to tell sometimes if Van is talking about God or a girl. Same goes for the rest of this special group. Such awkward separation is one of the reasons why Christian music, in particular, is so bad. It takes one extremely essential human issue (religion) and separates it from most everything else. Was that really the way it was meant to be, like distinct categories on the Jeopardy game show?
“One of the things that’s cool to me about life is that we can’t explain everything and that we are just these bones, these brains, and spirit,” Lovinggood says. “And it’s all kind of confusing, but mysterious. But embracing that mystery is – to me – what good art is. And that’s where a lot of good songs come from.”
There is a notable story behind the band’s name, by the way; one that sadly has absolutely nothing to do with Van Morrison.
“There is this old man who lives in our town,” Lovinggood explains. “We all grew up in this place called Homewood. There is this old man that always came to this coffee shop that we all kind of went to. Chip kind of became friends with him and he [Jim] had written this poem called ‘Wild Sweet Orange’ and gave it to him one day when he came in the coffee shop. And that guy actually died the next week. So Chip was, like, “Why don’t we name our band Wild Sweet Orange because his name was Jim and he gave me this poem.”
It’s perfectly appropriate for Jim to give this band a poem, when you think about it, because great rock and roll is oftentimes like poetry put to music. And music is one of the best ways to try and understand “these bones, these brains, and spirit,” as Lovinggood puts it.
“I think music is important to me because it’s intimate and it brings all different types of people together. I sometimes struggle with being judgmental, and I hate division. Music is so meaningful to me because it brings people together. No matter what kind of person you are, we’re all being touched by the same emotions, we have the same feelings. What’s so special about getting up in front of people and speaking or acting or singing is just something so exciting and exhilarating.”
Lovinggood equates creating great art with fully living – in that some among us are not truly alive unless we’re expressing ourselves through art. “If the artists weren’t doing this, they might as well be dead or want to be dead or something like that,” he observes.
Patrick Henry famously said, “Give me liberty or give me death.” But it wouldn’t surprise me to hear Preston Lovinggood say something like, “Give me an artistic outlet or give me death.” And he’d really mean it too, just like a true revolutionary. 
Dan MacIntosh is a freelance writer from Bellflower, CA. He used to live in Orange County, but there are few orange groves left there – the wild sweet variety or any other kind.
