Here is Olive: Four dudes from Alton who record their music buzzed and stoned, who first met each other because their parents knew the others’ parents through their bands, but they really met in high school, yet only recently did they get to know each other enough to make their own band. That circle of knowing is confusing, but it’s a small town thing, a rural thing, and small town or rural things are often overwhelmingly confusing. Olive understands the rural thing more than most artists today, because where some view the rural thing as cowboys and beer and twang, Olive sees the real loneliness without ever drifting into the realm of traditional country music. They’re not confused, despite the confusion in rural life.

Weber started Olive solo with post-COVID inspiration, that two year long worldwide volta which drove him to take his music learning seriously. His first EP, titled “Untitled 2019-2021,” was released in 2021. He recorded the music in his windowless bedroom at home, a farmhouse near Grafton, 30 minutes away from Alton up the Great River Road paralleling the Mississippi. It is this isolated world that Weber grew up in that inspired much of the early music and gave him ideas for a direction to go toward.

Most of his songs put emphasis on passing time: Losing close companions, dying, temporary and permanent loneliness; but recently, there are also sunrises and friends and seasons. This subtle change became most noticeable after Weber brought on the other three.

Olive became a group effort in 2024. Ian Whitmore—a veteran in the local music scene and also a mercenary musician currently frontmanning a couple of bands besides Olive (know that others in the band do this too, such as Weber, who drums for a band called St. Clair)—was working at Maeva's Coffee when he took the uniquely 21st century risk of scanning a random QR code sticker. The link led him to Olive, and he liked what he heard, so when he next saw Weber at the coffee spot he asked if Olive needed a drummer. 

Then, Weber brought in Jacob Gordon, who is the bassist, legal marijuana dealer at the local dispensary, and walking encyclopedia. Weber and Gordon had jammed together before, and their parents knew each other in high school and through their own bands, so an official collaboration just made sense. 

Finally, Olive recruited Cole Raub, Weber’s childhood friend and guitarist. Weber and Raub started playing music together after they left high school, and when Gordon caught him at a Ween concert, he said there was a vacancy open for a guitarist that Raub soon robbed.

It’s a contradiction you can find anywhere, but it is potent in rural life. Being out in the perimeter means waves crest slower than they do in the epicenter, and the epicenter of American life is always going to be coastal and urban—at least for as long as the sea stays where it is level-wise. Rural living has been away from the epicenter for 12,000 years, once people decided to stick around in the same spot for the first time. In all the years since, when city slicks felt sick of the noise they went to the woods, where things were a bit simpler. That ecosystem has been destroyed though, since now we’re all online.

Being raised out in the middle of nowhere while you have access to an anywhere/anytime machine can confuse even the most ordered individuals. It’s one thing to be lonely living amid the loneliest swaths of human settlement, but it’s another to be there and know you’re never really alone.

Weber & Co. think the world is on fire. Maybe that explains Olive’s trend toward chaos from the dreaminess in the distant yesteryears of 2022. The feeling of the world burning leads to new, strange decisions. Strange, not necessarily incorrect. And the feeling of rural life is that everything is happening out there, away from here, because all there is to see here are the shaded trees on the horizon and wandering critters while shit gets real elsewhere. Even more so with the internet. Now, there’s no escape from the daily goings-on, from the daily anxieties, though rural life has historically been the fix for an escape. Think Henry David Thoreau, Chris McCandless, Ted Kaczynski. Those three had their own unique five-year plans for their escape, but all likely initiated it for the same reason: There’s too much shit going on in these confusing times. I get the feeling these four have found their escape from the confusion when they enter the studio, grab hold of their instruments, pass around blinking weed pens and sip on their beers while Weber steps aside to hit record.

Take a bite of the olive, and see what grows.