Live from Studio D: Oshima Brothers

The Oshima Brothers are a self-described Japanese-Italian alt-pop sibling duo from the coast of Maine. Their sound is lush, multi-layered harmonies and instrumentation. Their self-titled debut record came out more than a decade ago; since then, they’ve recorded multiple albums and EPs, released dozens of videos, toured the country, and garnered millions of streams. We thought it was about time we had them over to New Hampshire for a session live from Studio D.

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Rick Ganley: Sean and Jamie, welcome.

Sean/Jamie: Hi, so glad to be here.

Rick: Great to have you guys. We’ve been wanting to have you in for a while, and you did not disappoint.

Jamie: The anticipation was killing me, so I’m glad we got through it.

Rick: In a description on your official website, you write that you make "open-hearted music with smooth blood harmonies and groovy guitar lines." What are "blood harmonies"?

Sean: Brother harmonies? Yeah. There are so many duos—brother-sister acts—where the harmonies just work together. We sometimes forget that, or we lose track of who’s singing; it’s just hard to tell our voices apart.

Jamie: Sometimes we sound similar but different, and it works out okay for us.

Rick: What does it mean to be siblings, as well as collaborators?

Sean: Everyone says, "Wow, I could never do this with my brother," or "Aw, you guys have so much fun." And we’re like, "That’s true," but we also don’t have fun — we're siblings!

Jamie: We have to work at it. On the road, we have our bad days, but we’ve been brothers for a while now.

Sean: Quite some time. We’re getting okay at it. We break down the roles in the band pretty well, taking on our strong suits. Jamie is producing all of the music and recording it all.

Jamie: I’m the band and the producer—the creative things. And Sean writes the songs.

Rick: I imagine there’s an inherent level of trust.

Sean: I think that’s a big part of making music and art: the trust that comes with collaboration. It makes us different and better than we would be without each other.

Rick: Both of you play several different instruments, and looping also plays a big part in building those soundscapes, especially when you're playing on stage as a duo. Tell me about that process.

Jamie: Looping was my first way of recording when I was about ten. I had a little loop pedal and I've just always been making a lot of sound by myself. Growing up in the middle of the woods, there weren't that many people to play music with. Now we use looping with a computer. We can create almost everything live and still have this huge sound that feels like a band of three or four people instead of just a duo.

Rick: Some of your music reflects on climate resilience. What does that mean to you, and why do you sing about it?

Sean: Oh man, it's just so important. It's on all of our minds as we come out of a cold season that is so much warmer than the last one, or how I remember them growing up. It needs to be a part of all of our art and work—trying to take care of the world and leave it better for our children and the people who come after us.

Jamie: We’re not scientists, but we can write pop music and sneak a little info in there. It’s fun to get people thinking about things in a different way while they sing along.

Rick: Can I ask you about the song "1942"?

Sean: That is a song for our grandfather. He grew up in California and was put into an internment camp as a kid. He was a US citizen, born and raised in the Bay Area, and like hundreds of thousands of other Japanese-American folks, he was imprisoned.

Picture this: the year is 1942 and he gets a notice for his whole family to report to a certain spot on a certain day. From that day forward, they had only what they could carry in a suitcase. They were brought to a racetrack and housed there for several weeks, then brought on a train to the desert where they were imprisoned for several years.

Jamie: They could only bring two suitcases. They lost their house; they lost everything.

Sean: They spent years of their life in an internment camp in the middle of the desert, completely stripped of their freedom as American citizens. I visited that site with my mother a few years ago, and it’s striking to stand in the middle of the desert where he once stood.

Sean: We wanted to make something that celebrated his life and story, but also drew parallels to today, where folks are still being taken away.

Rick: Was the spoken word portion of that song a direct story or a quote?

Sean: That portion was actually written by our cousin Dan, who is also a grandson of our grandfather, Bill. We discovered a video of our grandfather teaching a class in maybe the 80s. In essence, he was saying: "Don't think that it’s not going to happen again, because it will in a second."

Jamie: As soon as we label somebody as "other," as soon as we point the blame at somebody else — it happened in 1942 with Japanese Americans, and in Portland, Maine, we’ve been surrounded by increased operations from DHS and ICE. We’re really feeling that fear in our neighborhoods — the fear of losing everything and leaving loved ones behind.

Rick: Oshima Brothers — Sean and Jamie — thank you both for playing live for us in Studio D.

Sean: So happy to be here, Rick. Thank you.

Jamie: Yeah, thank you so much.

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