Oryx and Crake celebrate relationships and ‘Marriage’

Ryan Peoples and Rebekah Goode-Peoples acknowledge the complexities of commitments in their huge-sounding release ‘Marriage.’

DARK AND LIGHT: Oryx and Crake don’t sugarcoat love stories — not even their own.
Photo credit: Gregory Miller

? Married couple Ryan Peoples and Rebekah Goode-Peoples, mainstays of chamber/folk pop outfit Oryx and Crake, are accidental darlings of the Atlanta music scene. The two started making music together under the Margaret Atwood-nodding moniker eons ago, but got together and fell in love long before that. Oryx and Crake dropped its self-titled debut album in August 2010. Through it, the two proved that they hold a mastery of laying down pillowy textures with tons of strings and layered percussion, and cherubic vocals that sail just above the sepia expanse. Some non-local buzz grew to a steady hum but years passed before the group announced the arrival of its sophomore effort, Marriage, which drops via Deer Bear Wolf on Sept. 25. The group will have LPs for sale at the show on Saturday night.
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? Life, as it is wont to do, kept bubbling up in ways that made the development and recording processes drag. Ryan and Rebekah have full-time jobs outside of the band: She advises high school journalism, he works in sound design and composes music. Plus, they have have two kids running wild through their book-stuffed Grant Park home. It sounds like a lot of pressure and expectations to top off an already stacked plate. But that’s a crappy reason to drop a similarly crappy work. “There’s this rush,” Bekah says, perched on a cushy armchair in their warm living room. The cozy contentment of this couple’s Saturday night spent in in their home is palpable and refreshing. “I feel like a lot of not good albums come out because people feel like they have to.”
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? Marriage reflects a bit of their unorthodox journey tying them together, to the music, and their children. The album investigates not just romantic love and all its perks enjoyed by smug individuals deep in the throes of it. It picks at the tightly wound, thin copper wiring wrapped snug around its more grim aspects: fears, doubts, ugly impulses. It covers human relationships in their darkness and light. It takes a freshly-resined cello bow and pulls hard on commitment.
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? “The concept came early, the idea of marriage concepts and the idea of it not being about marriage exclusively,” Ryan says between swilling bourbon and flipping through a stack of Bill Callahan records. “It’s about any commitment you make whether it be to another person or a project. We wanted it to be as broad as possible. It could be a commitment to a career or a religion, even messed up stuff like a drug addiction. It might even be unintentional but still diving into it. You need something to fill the void. That’s what the concept was, more of a questioning: Why do we make these commitments? What do they mean to us? What kind of void do they fill in our lives?”
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? The religious concept rang as autobiographical to Rebekah who grew up in Roswell within the confines of a conservative church environment. “I was raised in a very strict, fundamentalist church and commitment was the core of that,” she says. “They valued commitment to that particular religion more than anything else. More than your commitment to your own family and children. Your commitment to the church was all-important. It inherently screwed up in my mind so I watched as people’s blind faith and commitment hampered their ability to have sound intellectual reasoning because all their eggs were in this one basket.”
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? ??? When Rebekah started lobbing eggs ITP and teaching high school in Decatur, she eventually ran into Ryan, a teacher at the same school. It took a minute for their connection to shake out irritable wrinkles and pave a cinematic transition into a more romantic realm. “I kinda liked annoying her,” Ryan says.
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? Rebekah was slightly hesitant to develop anything lasting with Ryan, who had a small child from a previous relationship named Sebastian. She didn’t have much previous experience with kids. “In fact, I never wanted children,” she says. “Not ever ever ever. … I did not understand small children.”
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? Ryan has a different memory. “She was instantly good with him,” he says, looking adoringly at his wife, coy smile slicked to his face. “I think one of the moments it became more serious, for me, was when you had clearly been to Target or whatever. Sebastian was on the swing and I had this cool screened porch. Rebekah, out of nowhere, just lifted her skirt up and she had Elmo panties. And Sebastian goes, ‘Elmo!’ I was like, ‘Ah. She’s awesome.’ I’ll never forget that. … That was a big moment for me.”
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? The love between the (Goode-)Peoples is rather obvious — intact and remarkably strong, even after almost nine years since their makeshift nuptials. When quizzed about exactly when their legit wedding happened, Rebekah avoids eye contact in exaggerated, joking shame. “We got married for super practical reasons and that’s why it’s not a date that I remember,” she says. “It wasn’t a wedding with invitations, save the dates, and do-a-thing-for-a-certain-day. We were on the couch and it was a Tuesday during our spring break from school. We were like, ‘What are we gonna do today? I don’t know.’ His insurance was running out and Sebastian wasn’t going to have health insurance. I had a full-time job. We had this realization … So yeah. It was a Tuesday. We called a guy out of the phonebook — you tell the rest.”
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? Ryan picks up: “We went to the beach. It was cool. We lived in Savannah. We went to Tybee Island and some dude married us in the water.”
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? Ryan, Rebekah, and Sebastian held hands standing in the eastern surf with just their downstairs neighbors playing last-minute witness to their union they called pragmatic at the time, but from an outside view, is so evidently tender and complex.
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? The two had Izzy six years ago and started making music together, nailing their back-and-forth process early through truly unique means: speaking a language so secret even they have trouble explaining how it functions. Ryan slips into a hypnotic zone and records himself singing wordless melodies and Rebekah transcribes what she hears in the amorphous mass of mouth sounds.
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? “It’s very similar to speaking in tongues,” she says. “But I will hear words. … It’s a little psychotic in a way, especially if we’re going through something together, and it’s me projecting. I’ll write this thing down and start with what I believe he said. And then I’ll go from there.”
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? Where Rebekah hears a hooded harmony that spills guts like a journal entry, Ryan believes lyrics act more as a vehicle to propel fairytale beauty. “Even if it happened to her or us, it’s just another fiction,” he says. “It’s kind of like being an author writing a fictional story.”
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? Ultimately, the two hold their own intentions with the music they make as Oryx and Crake but they’re happy with whatever impact it leaves on listeners. That’s part of why Marriage sails across the scope of human emotion the way it does. There is no wrong interpretation. They enlisted Sebastian to conceptualize a video for the burn-down-the-barn single “The World Will Take Care of Me” with zero guidance or sway. His 12-year-old brain cooked up something far from his parents’ expectations, dreaming up a graphic narrative involving the plight of homeless people. “His interpretation is so not what we had in mind — either one of us,” Ryan says. “But it was so cool to learn what he heard in there.”
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? Relationships, like art, have endless vantage points from which they may be dissected. And such dissection can happen as little or as often as one wants. Where young Sebastian hears bellowing optimism for those setting up camp in cardboard fortresses in “The World Will Take Care of Me,” that hardly scratches the thin membrane surface keeping the maracas and surging energy in one glimmering package. Ryan’s slightly Southern-tinged throat howling the chorus: “I don’t care if you go/ I don’t care if you walk out alone/ And the world will take care of me/ From now till I’m gone” could mean many things. Among them, independence and hope ring at booming volumes. But that’s just another take.
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? “I don’t know how much of my story and our story people are gonna get,” Rebekah says. “I’m sure there’s some parts of it where nobody will know what we’re talking about. I like books and I feel like I’ve never cared what the author intended.”
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?On Sept. 12, Rebekah and Ryan celebrate the release of Marriage at the Earl. With that, they celebrate love in all its weirdo, ambiguous forms — whatever that means to you. It’s a belated wedding reception of sorts and unlike the first time around, Rebekah will wear white and there will be dancing. Lots of it. Possibly cake, too. Formal attire encouraged.
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? Oryx and Crake celebrate the album release party for Marriage at the Earl with Sye Elaine Spence. $10. 9 p.m. Sat., Sept. 12. 488 Flat Shoals Ave. 404-522-3950. www.badearl.com.