Story by Bradford Zuckerman
Photos by Andy Abeyta
Mike Steinkirchner is hungry. “Let’s get a pizza!” he shouts. “With pineapple and onions!” Steinkirchner’s band mates, members of Eugene quartet Small Joys, laugh, agreeing to his suggestion. But they don’t want pineapple and onions. Dan Klee, the band’s guitarist and co-founder, says he doesn’t want olives. “I want olives oliv-er-it,” jokes Olivia Awbrey, Small Joys’ lead singer and songwriter. As if on cue, Steinkirchner responds, “Okay, Olive-ia!” Klee now claims he wants pepperoni. Will Bland, the band’s drummer, is a vegetarian. “I can pick off the pepperonis.” After a playful 25-minute pizza topping debate, the pie is ordered.
Less than 12 hours after winning Ethos’s annual Bandest of the Bands competition at the WOW Hall in Eugene, Oregon, Small Joys is upbeat. The night before, a cadre of fans had cheered them on as they commanded the venue’s stage. It was no surprise the young college band, clearly a community mainstay, took the title of crowd favorite at their biggest show to date.
Awbrey and Steinkirchner began performing together after meeting in 2009 at the University of Oregon. Klee met the duo at an open mic in 2010. Soon after, Klee and Awbrey became close friends and began playing cafés and open mic events around Eugene, eventually formalizing their act as Small Joys. Having first gone his own way, Steinkirchner later rejoined Klee and Awbrey, and the trio began jamming together at Awbrey’s home. “I had secretly wanted in the whole time because I’d heard Olivia’s songwriting and was like, ‘Oh, wow, she’s good at this,’” Steinkirchner says. The band’s drummer, Bland, later rounded out the current lineup.
Each of the four band members brings a unique musical background to the group, creating an unconventional, but cohesive sound. When trying to define what type of music they play, members list everything from folk to surf rock to “Honestly, we don’t know.”
As primary songwriter, Awbrey largely controls the band’s musical direction. Her taste centers on well-known UK folk artists like Glen Hansard and Frank Turner. Klee possesses less clearly defined music tastes. He cites bluegrass and folk, but in particular notes an affinity for grunge. Klee plays a Fender Jaguar, the same guitar used by Nirvana’s iconic front man, Kurt Cobain. The influence is obvious, but the tinny, reverbed guitar sounds Klee plays are equally reminiscent of the 1950s surf vibe produced by Carl Wilson of the Beach Boys. Steinkirchner’s tastes are more eclectic: He loves everything from Motown and funk to hip-hop, punk, and bluegrass. Bland shares Steinkirchner’s affection for hip-hop and funk, but also loves Latin percussion afrobeat, and says he would kill to master the steel drum. “You know when you get into Will’s car, because it sounds like Miami in the 1980s,” Klee laughs.
Together, Small Joys’ sound is a blend of each member’s colorful musical influences. “If I played alone,” Awbrey says, “my music would probably just be called folk, but with all of them coloring it—” Klee cuts her off, “It’s gotten weird.”
Typically, Awbrey writes one of her folk songs alone and then plays it for the band. Following her lead, the members then fill in their parts, pushing and pulling the song in whichever direction their intuition takes them. This is precisely how one of their more recent songs, “Jericho,” came to sound as it does.
Alone with her acoustic guitar, Awbrey wrote “Jericho” for a close friend who had passed away. One day when she played it for the group, Bland felt an urge to give the song a Latin spice rhythm. “I just started laying down this Latin beat over that, and it turned into a jam with all three of [the guys] on percussion.”
The content of Awbrey’s lyrics is as varied as the group’s tastes, though her themes remain humble and relatable. She writes stories and paints pictures of things that strike her at any moment. Klee describes Awbrey’s songs as “intimate, yet casual.”
Another of Awbrey’s songs, “Toy Boats,” recounts a hectic day of travel from her time studying abroad in Germany. The train she was on broke down in an unknown town, and only then, Awbrey says, did she realize just how far from home she was. Feeling lost, she glanced out the window to look for something familiar. Outside by a pond, she noticed a small group of children yelling and playing with toy boats. Comforted by their careless joy, she mused, “This might be paradise.” Awbrey says she recognized how important these moments are in a world that requires constant drive and determination and wrote, “We are focused, we are pointed / We are centered, we are sheltered / From the very moments that we need.”
Klee tries his best to describe Small Joys, claiming the band’s essence is reflected in its name. “It’s about the small joys embedded in the epic moments,” he says. Later, Awbrey clarifies: “The song ‘Small Joys’ reflects the feeling of the band. We’re ready to take off on an adventure, and at the same time, we stay focused on the things in life that make us happy, and music happens to be it.”
In November 2011, Klee, Awbrey, and Simon Adler—a friend and Eugene musician— opened Awbrey’s home for concerts under the venue name The Painted Porch. The stage was organized on her back porch where intimate bi-monthly shows called “Home-Brewed House Shows” were performed. In addition to music, guests at The Painted Porch enjoyed home-brewed beer and an opportunity to make art on a giant paint canvas. Awbrey says the venue quickly, but briefly, became established as the heart of the Eugene music community.
Together Small Joys has recorded one self-titled EP and a single called “Leaf Left” and has played shows in Eugene and Portland. But to everyone in the band, the short enthusiastic set surrounded by friends at the WOW Hall felt like a milestone. Bland, who was awed by the experience of finally walking through the venue’s “mystical back door,” admits he was surprised by how plain the room was. “I’ve seen artists I worship walking in and out of there, but it’s nothing special,” Bland says. “It helped me connect with how we always hold musicians in really high esteem, but they’re just normal people.”
This topic seems to pique the band’s interest. Steinkirchner recalls how record labels were once intricately involved in every aspect of the music, from creative direction to distribution, ultimately building pop artists as larger-than-life cultural symbols. But that’s not the case any more, Klee says. Since new technologies have made do-it-yourself production and distribution a reality, the focus in has shifted squarely onto the individual artist. As a result, what matters now is community, performance, and intimacy. “It’s all so much more accessible—and not just for the artist, but for the fan,” Awbrey says. “They don’t see us as this enigmatic, ‘How did they do that?’ type of figure.” In this way, Awbrey notes, the line separating the artist and the audience is fading.
Few embrace this paradigm shift like Small Joys, who are truly the quintessential backyard band. As they humbly acknowledge that The Painted Porch was—in many regards—the only venue that qualified as the heart of a Eugene music “community,” a word choice the band explicitly prefers to “scene.” Having met, made their name, and created a broad community foundation that eventually led to the band opening the back door at the WOW Hall, it’s no surprise they cherish the intimacy.
