Echoing the sound of some of my favorite classic electronic bands like Depeche Mode and New Order, Olive Dares the Darkness bills itself as a progressive art collective that seeks to bring new sounds to the shores of Charleston, South Carolina, Olive Dares the Darkness. That collective features Becca Darling on vocals and keyboard, Mike Baum on guitar, Danielle Carlson on drums and Mr. Minister on bass. The band also hosts ODDcast, an online radio show at sleradio.com, at 7 p.m. EST on Tuesdays. To find out more about the band, I sent a few questions out to guitarist Mike Baum — and he replied with a few questions of his own, which you’ll find at the end of this post!

I love the name of your band! Who’s Olive? 

Olive is a character we created to represent a person who accepts all aspects of herself, the good and the bad, and is infinitely more powerful for accepting the whole, as opposed to parts.

How did the band come together? 

Mr Minister and I are brothers and have played together since childhood. I moved to Charleston in 2014 and met Becca via craigslist ad. We played together in an acoustic duo. Mr. Minister moved to Charleston in 2016 and we started an early version of Olive with a drum machine… which sucked. Danielle joined late 2018 because we had a virgin islands tour lined up. She had never played set in a band before, only pit bands for musicals. It was a rapid and brutal introduction but she took it like a pro. We had cycled through some other members which will remain unnamed and unmentioned, but the chemistry the four of us had immediately clicked so the Olive as we know it now was really born in 2019 in the Virgin Islands. We’re an island baby.

I was reading through the band’s bio and was struck by how briefly—and nonchalantly—it mentions that lead singer Becca Darling survived cancer. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised, given some earlier details in the bio, like the fact that Darling is often “busy dripping in sarcasm,” but I’m still curious about why that detail gets mentioned so quickly and is just as quickly brushed away. 

We don’t want to dwell on stuff. It was just another tool that we used to help us write stories. Everyone has trauma, everyone has struggles, it feels cheap to try and milk ours for notoriety. It is especially gross now in the modern era where everybody is playing this weird game of trauma one-upmanship. It’s a thing that happened, it sucked, she survived, we grew. We got the song All Right Now out of it. Me and Becca are very close so I felt like if I wrote a song where Becca was past the cancer she would absolutely HAVE to get past the cancer. I would give her rides to chemotherapy and started writing it on the way back and forth.

I’m also curious about the description of Darling as “an overly-educated educator,” largely because I’m one myself. How do teaching and music fit together in her life? 

Three members of this band are music educators. Quickly… I told Becca about a music school that was opening up. We both applied, Becca got the job where she met Danielle, the percussion teacher. Becca quickly moved to prominence and got me a job there as well. Between the 3 of us there is something like 25+ years of school…

And she played with Stevie Wonder once. What’s the story there?

Becca is a minor celebrity in the Virgin Islands. One night she started to bust out some Stevie Wonder with her band and it turned out he was in the audience. He hopped on stage and jammed with her.

Mike Baum, who plays guitar and is the band’s primary programmer, is described as “the crazy member of the band.” Crazy in what way?  

Like Syd Barrett crazy, just without the brilliance. A real emotional roller coaster. Depression is a hell of a drug. You get some great art which brings you some real highs, but the crashes are amongst the worst out there. Constant vacillation between self-assured brilliance and crushing self doubt. You get it. 

Mr. Minister, on bass, is Mike Baum’s brother. How does that relationship play out in the band? Do they get along or have any peculiar ways of communicating with each other? 

We are very close so it adds cohesion to the band. I think where some bands might have fights that crush the dream, we can have fights that feel like a sibling tiff. We’re able to talk openly and honestly and move past stuff quickly. I think that since two members are literal family, it has allowed everyone to be open and honest like family and it has increased the overall bond between us. Becca and Danielle are like our little sisters. This is often evident at shows when a fan decides to get handsy… We genuinely care about each other more than the band which allows it to exist free of ego.

He’s really an ordained minister? How do ministry and music complement each other? 

Yup! He got ordained for my wedding. He was in school for cognitive science at the time so it was originally Dr. Minister’s Mury (marry) and Bury. The doctor thing didn’t happen so he switched to Mr. Minister, which sounds better anyway. He has an official robe that he wears on stage sometimes which looks super rad. We live in the super uptight south so he occasionally officiates weddings for gay couples.

The band originally used a drum machine, but then Danielle Carlson joined the band on drums. How did the drum machine take it? 

Super butt hurt, but he is a machine so we didn’t care what he thought. Actually, Krang (the name of our stage sequencer… after the Ninja Turtles) didn’t mind. He already had too much on his plate with the backing tracks. He was appreciative that we took that off his plate so he could focus on his first love, tubular bells.

She’s classically trained. What dimension does that training add to the band’s music? 

I guess we’re all classically trained. I went to school for classical guitar before switching to anthropology and psychology. Mr. Minister started on Trumpet. You should hear Becca’s opera voice… 

In Danielle’s case, she is a monster composer and arranger. She writes all of her drum parts in standard notation long before she tries to play the parts on the set. She is a skilled piano player as well as trumpet player. When the band hits a dead end, we turn it over Danielle and she usually comes back with brilliance.

The band does a decent amount of touring—and goes fairly far afield from Charleston. How do you fit it into your lives? 

As teachers, we get a good amount of time off during the summer. Since none of us are from Charleston, it is fairly easy to book shows in and around our home towns. It makes us look bigger and more important than we really are, but now I guess everybody will know our trick.

No worries! Your secret is safe with me an all of my readers! You mentioned on Twitter that you make music because you want to self-destruct on camera. Can you elaborate on that?

At the end of the day, we’re just kind of irreverent jerks… and I mean that lovingly. I think music is incredibly silly. When I hear musicians emote about their “vision” or “art” I want to vomit. I have this this instrument that I noodle around on and by the amazing grace of our audience, occasionally I get to do it live and get paid. Sometimes I think about if all the guitarists disappear, fans would be sad but move on, but if all the garbage men or truckers disappeared, society as a whole would collapse. We’re less important than garbagemen in the grand scheme of things, and it is important to remember that to keep perspective. The audience is the special half of the relationship, not us. So when I say self destruct on camera, I’m kind of poking fun at all my heroes who took their art so seriously they fell apart. I suppose that had I “made it” when I was young I could have easily joined them but I didn’t, so here I am making fun of my fate.

Mr. Minsiter has always had a dream to one day crash a tour bus into a Super 8, so I suppose that counts too.

I love the photo at the top of your Twitter profile—the band seated in an otherwise empty theater. It’s dark and grainy and looks like something from a David Lynch movie. What theater was it, and who took the picture?

That was taken at the Queen Street Playhouse in Charleston by a dude named Ed Brantley. Danielle was the music director for a company that did productions there. Before she was in Olive, she roped me into playing along side her in the pit for the musical, Heathers.

You also do a weekly radio show called the ODDcast. How would you describe it?

That is mostly me and my buddy Sean, but rest of the band stop by from time to time as well. Sean is my primary concert buddy so we joke it is really a weekly taping of what the drive to a show sounds like.

What do you like about doing the show?

We like the process of finding and reaching out to indie artists. I got super tired of everybody charging me money to put me on some garbage playlist so the show is kind of a reaction to that. It is completely free and we’ve had the pleasure of really making a lot of people’s happy. 

Anything else going on? Plans for the future?

We’re wrapping up our second album, II. We hope to have it out before the end of the year. We’re chatting with a  booking agent now to start thinking about what we’re doing this spring and summer.  We desperately want to go to the UK to play shows. Onward and upward I guess, at least until we self destruct on camera.

And now we turn the table with a few quick questions from Mike Baum:

What do you teach?

I teach English 101, which is College Composition. It’s a writing course designed to give students a sense of how to write an academic essay. I think of the course as a foot in the door for anyone interested in going on to pursue a career in academia, though it’s also a good way to learn how to make and support a point in a concise and organized fashion.

Where do you teach?

Montgomery County Community College.

Why do you teach?

As I write this, a new semester has just begun, and I’m asking myself the same question. But I suppose the answer has something to do with wanting to help people recognize that they’re more than just consumers of whatever popular culture or capitalism wants to shove down their throats. You mentioned Syd Barrett in one of your answers earlier—and, side note, autocorrect keeps trying to change “Syd” to “Sid.” I tried typing it four times, and it wouldn’t let me write “Syd” until I Ctrl-Z-ed it. Which is kind of in line with why I teach. 

Consumer culture wants everyone to be on auto-pilot and let the computers do all the thinking. And that’s in line with the original point I was going to make about Syd Barrett — or at least Pink Floyd. I was listening to Wish You Were Here yesterday, and I feel like it speaks to a lot of the issues that concern me. We’re all born to the machine in one way or another, but if we learn to dig deeper, learn to think critically, learn to see beyond the bullshit, then we might rediscover our humanity and be less anxious and depressed as a people. I mean, when they sing “Wish you were here,” I hear it as a call for presence in the world, of mindfulness, for lack of a better word. I wish everyone were here, present in their lives, engaged with the world, and not just chasing their tails in an effort to—I don’t even know what—accumulate more shit they don’t need, I guess, or amass whatever our culture tells us we need to amass. 

So I suppose the reason I teach is that there aren’t many jobs where I can go on about that kind of thing without getting fired. Less cynically, I hope to reach the handful of students each year who either need to hear that message or are open to it: If you think the world we live in is crazy, you’re right. If you think our culture’s priorities are screwed up, you’re right. If you think there’s more to life than chasing after shiny objects, you’re right.

Plus I like having summers off.

What would you rather be doing instead of teaching?

As far as professions go, I think teaching is the way for me to go. That said, when I’m not teaching, I like to dabble in various artistic pursuits, music chief among them. I’m not sure I’d like to make a living at music or the arts more generally, though, because it would add a level of stress that would ruin it for me. If I had to worry about writing hit songs, for example, I couldn’t make the weird, idiosyncratic music that I love making. 

Why is the field struggling? What do you think needs to happen to help it?

One big reason the field is struggling is that the vast majority of people don’t understand what education is or why it’s valuable. For the most part, people think of education as job training: you go to high school to get into a “good” college so you can learn the skills you need to get a high-paying job. It’s a horrible way to look at education, but it’s completely in line with the ethos of consumer culture and advanced capitalism that I can’t stand. Basically, it’s training people to be cogs in a machine, as clichéd a statement as that may be. And everyone buys into—especially the people who run the schools and the school systems. 

So you put people like me—and you, I imagine—into the system because we’re the only people who can or will actually do it for the amount of money they pay, and we start to get burnt out because we’re dealing with pressure from all sides. From above, we’re being told that we need to teach “skills” and focus on “outcomes” so that students can be prepared for the job market. From our students—and, of course, their parents—we’re getting a lot of the same pressure, because they’ve bought into the logic of the system, too. 

But guess what? A.I. is coming down the pike if it’s not already here. All those “skills”? All those “outcomes”? If that’s all you learned, you’re screwed. But if you learned to be human, learned to contextualize information, learn to understand everything you know in relation to the vast reservoir of human knowledge and experience that’s come before, learned to be creative, learned not to rely on machines and formulas and what the masses are doing for all the answers, you might have a shot at living. 

There are a lot of other reasons, too, but that’s at the heart of it.