Oliver Hazard Keep Coming Back to Waterville.
There are places you leave and places that keep finding their way back into the work. For Oliver Hazard, Waterville, Ohio has become both: the town where the band formed, the landscape that keeps resurfacing in their songs, and a place that has slowly become part of the mythology surrounding them.
– WORDS BY CJ • PHOTOS BY TOMMY MOORE
On Raindrop River, though, Waterville feels less like scenery and more like something the band is still trying to understand.
“Memory is more feeling than fact,” says Mike Belazis. “You remember the light, how big a hill felt when you were ten, the way a place made you feel. A lot of our Waterville probably lives somewhere between the town that’s actually there and the one we’ve carried around with us.”
The title track returns to an old childhood hiding place, a swing on Barry’s Hill, but it is not really interested in preserving the place exactly as it was. The song sits in that gap between what happened and what survives in your head years later. That idea runs through the record in other ways too. Oliver Hazard’s earliest recordings were famously simple: microphones around a room, three people playing the songs straight through, and not much concern for what a proper studio record was supposed to sound like.
“There’s a lot of freedom in not knowing what you’re doing,” Belazis says. “Back then, we just put microphones around a room and played. Now we know how many options there are, so the trick is knowing when to forget all of that and just be three friends playing a song together.”
That instinct remains all over Raindrop River. Voices crack, entrances arrive a little early and the sound of the room itself occasionally makes it onto the finished record. The difference now is that Oliver Hazard understand exactly what they could fix and are choosing not to.
“We’ve always cared more about whether a take feels right than whether it’s perfect,” Belazis says. “Sometimes you try to clean something up and realize the first, slightly crooked version had all the life in it.”
The band have also had to loosen their grip on what an Oliver Hazard song is supposed to sound like. Early limitations helped establish their identity, but those same boundaries eventually became something they needed to move beyond.
“Probably the idea that Oliver Hazard had to sound a certain way,” Belazis says of what the band had to leave behind. “Early on, our limitations helped create our sound. Eventually we had to give ourselves permission to wander a little.”
What stayed was more fundamental: the harmonies, the stories and the feeling of the three of them playing together in one place.
That collaborative identity matters in a band with three songwriters and three voices. An idea may enter the room belonging to one person, but it rarely leaves in the same shape.
“Letting go of the version you heard in your own head” is the hardest part, Belazis says. “Someone brings in a song and the other two start pulling it somewhere unexpected. That can be hard, especially with something personal. But at some point it has to stop being your song and become an Oliver Hazard song.”
The same sense of shared ownership has always extended to the audience. Oliver Hazard built much of their early following through living-room shows, sometimes playing to only a few dozen people at a time. Those rooms taught them how quickly a concert changes when there is almost no physical or emotional separation between the people playing and the people watching.
“We still try to treat a big room like a living room,” Belazis says. “Talk to people, look around, leave some room for the night to go off script. Those house shows taught us that the best nights happen when the line between the band and the crowd gets a little blurry.”
It also taught them not to judge a show too quickly. Producer Jacquire King first encountered Oliver Hazard during a performance when almost nobody else in the room appeared particularly interested.
“You can walk offstage thinking nobody cared, while one person in the back heard something that really stuck with them,” Belazis says. “Jacquire is obviously a pretty lucky example. It taught us not to judge a night by how much chatter is in the room. You never really know who’s listening.”
Waterville itself has undergone a similar shift in scale.
Oliver Hazard Day began as a fundraiser and has grown into an event people now travel specifically to attend. Fans drive hours to visit the streets, businesses and places they first heard about through the band’s songs.
“It’s pretty wild meeting someone who drove six hours to stand on the street we started the band on,” Belazis says. “Seeing people make their own memories in Waterville has made us appreciate the place differently too.”
That attention has also made the band conscious of how easily a hometown can become romanticized once outsiders start looking in. The Waterville in Oliver Hazard songs is personal, but Belazis is careful not to present it as some flawless small-town ideal.
“Waterville isn’t some perfect little storybook town,” he says. “Like anywhere, it’s complicated. Our songs are really just our version of growing up in the region: the river, the people, wanting to leave and then realizing how much of home you carried around with you.”
The band have started thinking about how some of what makes Oliver Hazard Day special could travel with them. Not by trying to recreate Waterville everywhere they go, but by making shows feel connected to the town they are actually in, working with local coffee shops, breweries, artists and businesses rather than simply arriving, playing and leaving.
“The part we can take with us is that feeling of a show belonging to the town it’s in,” Belazis says.
The rest stays in Ohio.
“Our families are nearby, our friends are nearby, the community, the river and streets are in the songs. You can carry the spirit of Waterville somewhere else, but you can’t fake the roots.”
That may be the clearest way to understand Raindrop River. Oliver Hazard are no longer the band blindly placing microphones around a room because they do not know another way to make a record, and Waterville is no longer simply the town where three friends happened to start playing together.
Both have accumulated history. Oliver Hazard are just trying not to polish away the parts that made either one worth remembering.
