Just a Little Bit of Lafayette In 7OrangeABC

Guess the name: It’s a musical group of four, slightly cocky young guys. The sound, influenced by rock, folk and classical music traditions, is distinct. The lyrics are contemporary, poetic, and written in the language of the common man. In an interview, they all laugh and talk at once.

If you said “The Beatles,” you’re wrong.

And while some may consider it sacrilege to suggest a similarity, the mystery band’s rowdy, revelatory personality and sophisticated songwriting means your guess is not completely off the mark.

The band is 7OrangeABC, an East Bay foursome not led by Lafayette native Daniel Wright.

Although Wright sings lead vocal and his fellow band members moved their operation from Boston to Berkeley partly because of his connection to the area, the band’s collaborative weave is too complex to separate into easy, individual strands of leadership.

The same can be said of how the band arrived at a name and the process members use to write music.

7OrangeABC is a label they developed as a comment on the proliferation of bands today — anticipating a time when groups would be forced to resort to only numbers, colors and letters for identification.

Busting out is another motif, one Wright began at an early age.

“I was in sixth-grade band, but the next year, they wouldn’t let me play my guitar in the jazz band without also playing horn or something like that in the orchestra,” he said. “Everyone in orchestra looked kind of miserable, so I quit.”

But he didn’t stop making music and eventually, he attended and graduated from Boston’s Berklee College of Music.

That is where he met Trevor Bahnson, Mateo Lugo and Haggai Cohen Milo.

The Berklee school, whose website calls it “the world's premier learning lab for the music of today—and tomorrow,” gets slammed by the four alumni.

“Music school is almost the opposite of making music,” Milo said. “It ties up your brain in a weird way.”

“They gave me a structure to stay in and dug it into my brain,” Bahnson said.

“Musical theory about proper cadence and the like are tricks and were invented in retrospect after people made real music,” Lugo added.

“We’re still escaping what music school did to us,” Wright said.

They can’t say enough bad things about the effect of formal music education, but listening to their CD, it’s clear the best elements of their rigorous training have invaded their sound.

On This is Not the End, a track available on the band’s monthly online newsletter, there’s a spaciousness and a pacing, regardless of tempos, that demonstrate a discerning editorial ear.

Listening to selections on their new CD, Talk To Strangers, there’s deliberate mastery as Lugo’s guitar succumbs imperceptibly to Milo’s woeful bass and the textural sound blend of Wright’s John Lennon-like vocal tones meshes perfectly with the band’s driving instrumentals.

They may resent the structures imposed on them at Berklee, but the organized sound that still manages to feel organic—and the rebellious process they use to create it—is directly related to their education.

“We try to break our ideas of what’s cool,” Milo said.

“We play what’s important to the music and only that,” Bahnson added.

Wright, who, along with Bahnson, writes the group’s lyrics, retreated into silence for most of our interview. Under direct questioning, he spilled a flurry of details about songwriting.

“I write lyrics three ways," he said. "Spontaneous word writing, music that turns into words, and just playing guitar and singing. And one song is backwards music.  We played the music backwards, then made words out of the sounds we heard.”

 7OrangeABC embraces technology but knows its downside, too.

“The dream of making a million-dollar record isn’t there anymore. And it’s more confusing for the public because it’s a free-for-all,” Bahnson said.

“Now, you can get everything for free," Milo said. "Even artists like Radiohead don’t fight for people to pay for it.” 

“The whole mentality is about owning and selling music. That changes how people listen to it,” said Lugo.

Wright insisted that live music has become more important as the abundance of recorded music grows.

With that, the band, as if by 7OrangeABC ESP, stood up and headed out the door. They intend to start a revolution, or at least, wipe the soil of preconceived expectations off their score and make music for tomorrow.

7Orange ABC's release party for its new CD will be Wednesday at 8 p.m. at The Rickshaw Stop in San Francisco.

The band will appear at a special acoustic show at , at 7 p.m. April 17.