When Orion Faruque was a child, and adults asked him, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” he remembers thinking, “I kinda just want to sit in my bedroom and play music.”
Now, at 29, Faruque is a working musician, and also the founder of local recording and production studio RedMusic Productions. Through his solo project, Orion and the Melted Crayons, he’s released singles and played many, many gigs. But when the pandemic hit, Faruque found himself sitting in his bedroom, playing music—it became the perfect environment to write Orion and the Melted Crayon’s debut album, The Good Stuff.
Faruque has experience creating under extreme circumstances. When he left Charlottesville to attend McNally Smith College of Music in Minnesota, he took nothing but a duffel bag and a guitar and slept on the floor of an empty apartment, until a concerned neighbor offered him a mattress. “I was 20 years old and like, ‘this is awesome!’” he laughs. Soon after graduating, he moved to his grandparents’ house near Asheville, North Carolina, to “go live on top of this mountain and study myself as a person and an artist.” He says that “during that time, I wrote something absurd, like 65 songs.”
These experiences line up with Faruque’s musical philosophy. “I aggressively haven’t given myself the option to do anything other than music,” he says. “I could get another job to support it. But if I do that, I’m not gonna do what I need to do. I need to feel like I’m starving to make music.”
Yet after moving back to Charlottesville in 2018 and jumping into the hectic pace of shows and tours, Faruque started to feel burned out. “You’re playing a bar show out of town, people have no idea who you are, and there’s a bunch of drunk people yelling for you to play some song you don’t know,” he says. “On some level, it’s like, ‘What am I doing?’”
The pandemic gave Faruque time to reconnect with his music on an intuitive level. “I was just making sounds in my apartment,” he says. “I hear a song in my head, I’m gonna play it. I feel like there’s true beauty there.” A few months into the COVID shutdown, he realized he’d written enough songs to make an album. The Good Stuff will debut on September 3 on Spotify and Bandcamp, with a release party at The Southern Café & Music Hall on September 4.
The album draws upon Appalachian roots, but Faruque also branches out. “If you take funk and jam band music together, then add the lyrical sensibilities of folk and the colors of jazz,” he says, “it creates a really interesting sound.” On the funky, psychedelic tune “What Is Love,” he plays every instrument, and saxophonist Gina Sobel, Kendall Street Company’s Ryan Wood, Louis Smith, and Brian Roy help out on other tracks.
While musically diverse, the album is centered around one theme: focusing on the good stuff. “E9” is a meditation on what we can learn from the pandemic, while “The Letter” explores Faruque’s grief around losing his dad at 14. Even then, he retains threads of hope. In “The Letter,” he sings: “If it’s raining / why is the sun shining through?”
With the debut album done, what’s next for The Melted Crayons? “I really hope that I don’t have to make a record like this for a while, just because it was so much work,” Faruque jokes. But that seems unlikely for a musician who doesn’t give himself the option to do anything else.