Self-described musician, filmmaker, and belly dancer Oliver Tree has made waves on and off the internet for his eccentricity and fuck ass bobs. The Californian multi-hyphenate — who was one of the most talked-about performers at Boston Calling ’22 — released his third album, Alone in a Crowd, last fall via Atlantic Records, along with its accompanying fashion designer persona in Cornelius Cummings. Now, Tree is taking the show on the road with the aptly titled Alone in a Crowd Tour, which hits MGM Music Hall at Fenway this Friday (January 19). As expected, he has a lot to say about it.
Ahead of the tour kicking off in Chicago a few days ago, Tree jumped on the phone with Vanyaland to discuss what to expect from the mega production of the show, as well as comparing filmmaking to music making, and why he considers the upcoming Boston appearance to be a hometown gig. We sat back and let Tree just let it rip.
(Note: the following interview has been edited for length, flow, and clarity.)
Vanyaland: You’re starting a tour [this past weekend] in Chicago. How are you feeling about that?
Oliver Tree: I’m excited. I’ve been working on the show for five years. So it’s a mixture of a movie, a TV show, a concert, and a Broadway play. There is a 360 entertainment component that also includes stand up comedy, uh, motivational speaking, WWE wrestling, karate scooter tricks, as well as some belly dancing, obviously. The music side is a mixture of alternative pop, rock, hip hop, electronic, dance, folk, a little bit of my attempt at country music. It’s a wide span and array of different styles and I’m really excited about that. That’s one show that I’m doing.
I’m also playing a same another show the same night, where I will be debuting my Doctor Oliver Tree project, which is a DJ set afterparty [taking place at The Grand in the Seaport]. And I’ve been working on this show for a year and a half. Boston will be the official first look at the audio-visual show I’ve been developing for the last year and a half. Obviously, the focus is the first show, which I’ve been developing for a long time, but this other DJ set is something I poured my heart into. It’s something super next level. It pushes the boundaries on what DJing is and can be. Everything is hyper edited and remixed and my fingertips are covering every millisecond of every moment. It’s a mixture of my music, mixed with all my favorite nostalgic music edited to my exact tastes, with visual components that incorporate some of my work as well as my favorite snippets, fully edited and chopped up beyond oblivion, of my favorite moments in cinema.
It’s very psychedelic, very visceral, very raw. It’s called Doctor Oliver Tree, so I’m really excited about that as well. That’s kind of something that’s a new thing. I haven’t even announced that my fans or anything, but I’m very, very excited about that.
What can folks expect from the two shows?
Well for both of the shows, it’s extremely eclectic. So there will be something for everyone. The main show, the Alone in a Crowd Tour, that is full showmanship, full entertainment meets art meets technology. There is a choose your own adventure aspect where the audience can kind of decide what they want to watch. There’s a lot happening visually on the screen. There’s also a full band, an orchestra, there’s a lot of moving parts to it all. You can kind of latch on to whichever parts you want. That’s for people that are kind of not really aware of what they’re getting themselves into.
People who are a fan of [the music], they can expect the best of from the first album, Ugly is Beautiful, mixed with the best stuff of the second album, Cowboy Tears, mixed with the best of Alone in a Crowd. It kind of combines all these worlds, and you get a chance to be introduced to the different characters and personas and see how the whole world and “Oliverse,” the Oliver Tree multiverse, comes together. You get a sense of how the dots are all connected and it covers a lot of the heart and soul put into the music. But there’s a lot of tongue-in-cheek and satire and parody and the visual component as well as some pretty heavy statements on commercialism and exploring a wide plethora of all things meta.
Essentially the crowd is watching me on stage while I perform, as well as at times, [I’m] sitting on a couch, my character’s on a screen in their house, watching themselves on a screen, watching them in their own music videos, which in some music videos they’re even watching themselves again. So it’s five layers deep at times.
Not a lot of people know this, but I lived in Boston until I was six years old, south of Boston. And I go back every summer, so this will be essentially a hometown show for me. I’ve been touring for almost a year now, and it’s very well oiled, and I’ve kind of got it down to math and science. So I’m very excited to bring it back to the motherland, pushing forward both these sets, [including the DJ set] that I’m debuting in Boston as well as the live show before that.
They’re both on the cusp of pushing forward the idea of what these kinds of performances can be. Not that you can ever recreate wheel, but I think that there are some pretty big ideas being contributed here. I’m not saying I’ve invented anything, but I’m very excited to be contributing some new ideas in the creative space.
How does filmmaking compare to music for you?
Ultimately I consider them probably as far apart, creatively speaking, as they can be while still being a form of art that is released digitally online. Music is a little more improv-based. I was just in Hong Kong and I was in hotel rooms, recording, just improvising, making it by myself. Just the raw thing. And when you get to film, it’s the exact opposite. It’s pretty much an army of people. Some of these videos had hundreds of people helping create them, so full collaboration, very rigid planning. Everything’s planned down to the millisecond
They’re very much wildly different. Music is very much so instantaneous. I think that’s why I ultimately chose it as my main medium, because it’s a lot easier to get someone to invest even ten seconds to listen. They’ll know if they like it or not within the first 10 or 30 seconds. It’s pretty hard to get someone to watch a film. Even a music video is a little harder to than a song to get someone to, sit down and watch. But in the same breath, filmmaking to me is like the greatest art form in a sense, because it’s all art forms combined. You mix together everything I’ve ever done as a human, like, for example, the writing, the production, direction, acting, the stunts (cause I have a background as a professional scooter rider and doing action sports), choreography, designing costumes. There’s so much in there that for me, I feel like it’s a way where I can kind of put a lot of my own self into it, whereas music, you have a little bit less room for that.
Going back to the evolution of your sound over the course of three albums, you went more country-adjacent on your second album [Cowboy Tears], and then this latest release is a sonic departure from that. What has that process been like for you over the course of these album cycles?
I make art for myself first and foremost when I’m creating. I need to be able to reinvent myself and feel inspired, and the goal of creating the Oliver Tree project was to never be pigeonholed as one thing. So I’ve always kind of kept my audience on their toes. And not every single thing is made for every single person, but there is something for everyone.
After spending five or six years doing the first rollout of Ugly is Beautiful, it was so, so dense. It was like 20 videos of the same character. I was just so ready for something so wildly different, and the exact last thing anyone would expect [would be] to make a country album, because I don’t even like country music. So I had fun with that, as well as getting in touch with my roots. It wasn’t like it was un-authentic because my grandfather was a cowboy. I grew up to the ranch, working on the ranch. His father was a cowboy. His father before that was a cowboy, so it’s part of my lineage. And as I was looking internally at what I wanted to do, that kind of made sense [in addition to] the time I spent on the ranch during COVID.
I had set some rigid rules on what the album sonically should be. No rapping, everything needed to have basically acoustic guitar. There were a lot of rigid rules and it was more of a concept album. And that’s kind of one of those things [where if] people aren’t into that sound for one of the songs, then they’re probably not as likely to like any of it.
That being said, I wasn’t worried about that. I wasn’t trying to make some commercial thing. I was coming off of the success of “Life Goes On,” which was the first song that became a big TikTok song for me. So I didn’t really need to have the commercial success. That was truly artistic expression, a statement on macho, being able to kind of say it’s okay for guys and not just guys, but for everyone to cry. It’s important to cry, we can let out our aggression or sadness through the tears instead of through violence. So I think it was a cool concept.
The third album was coming off the tail of “Miss You” and the success of that, which was my second big TikTok song. The more more famous I became, for lack of a better term — I hate the idea of celebrity, I hate idea of fame, but it’s part of the job as far as getting my art to be heard and seen by people — I felt more lonely than ever.
I had amassed 50 million TikTok followers, but I [had] never felt so lonely. And that story is not exactly that relatable, nor is it particularly that interesting. But more importantly, to create art that connects with people, there has to be a relatability factor. So what’s more relatable than being lonely? It didn’t matter the reasons behind it. So I wanted to make an album that celebrated learning to be able to be alone and to recognize that everybody’s lonely at some point or another. We’re all dealing with loneliness. It’s part of the human experience. And if you look around, you see all these lonely people, it actually makes the experience a little bit less lonely. So I made that the core messaging.
And in the process of it, I made maybe seven or eight versions of the same album, and it was a lot darker at first. After coming out of Cowboy Tears and making a breakup album that was already somewhat dark and a little depressing, I had started falling in love during the process of Alone in a Crowd. I feel like I always forget to document the falling in love process. So I wanted to capsulate it and put it into a bottle and be able to share it with other people. I still think that it can apply to the concept. You can still be alone in a crowd with someone else. Ultimately the goal is to take people out of their darkness and bring some color into their life — make them feel a little bit better about what they’re dealing with.
OLIVER TREE + FIDLAR + JASIAH :: Friday, January 19 at MGM Music Hall at Fenway, 2 Lansdowne St. in Boston, MA :: 8 p.m., all ages, $42 to $96.50 :: Event info :: Advance tickets