It’s weird, but all of my memories connected to Oliver Tree are somehow related to tragedy. The first time I heard Oliver Tree’s music, I was lying down on a twin mattress in North Sacramento. It was 2020 and the pandemic was in full swing.
I was depressed, which was the natural state of being at the time. People were dropping dead of what amounted to a mystery respiratory illness, California was on fire, and the ashes of people’s entire lives were raining down on us under the glow of a dark orange sky.
There was also George Floyd, who was murdered in an especially cruel way by the Minneapolis Police Department, and people were demonstrating in the street.
It felt like the end of the world, and maybe it was. Everything has felt odd ever since. Maybe we all died during the pandemic and what we experience as contemporary reality today is just a collective delusion that grows more absurd by the minute.
But luckily for me, I wasn’t completely isolated. I was living with my best friend and his girlfriend while the rest of the world went insane.
One day, while I was silently staring at the ceiling, I heard a knock on my bedroom door, it was Jeremy. He could tell I wasn't doing well and walked in holding a laptop.
The music video for the song “Hurt,” one of Oliver Tree’s breakout singles for his debut album, Ugly Is Beautiful was paused for me to watch from the beginning.
“Watch this, I think you’ll like it,” he said as he handed me the laptop and walked out of the room.
I pressed play and immediately fell in love with the absurd world of Oliver Tree
The video for “Hurt” was a stroke of creative genius for the internet age. The music video featured Oliver Tree getting driven around Eastern Europe in a hearse only for his head to get blown off by a tank, he later jumped off of a building and was crucified on a giant Razor scooter before falling to his death.
Despite the outlandish visuals, there were some poignant lines in the song. As Oliver jumps out of a casket, he says with an exaggerated look on his face “I changed my whole life when I learned to ignore them.”
It sounds simple enough, but most people struggle with that.
Much of Oliver’s music had this combination of absurd presentation and lyrics about heartbreak and abandonment over an eclectic set of instrumentals that could land anywhere between Hip Hop, Nu Metal, Pop Punk and EDM.
He was an exciting artist that blended meme culture, pop music sensibilities, and genuinely vulnerable lyrics into a sound that could fit as easily in someone’s vinyl collection as it could in their TikTok algorithm.
He was an artist you wanted to watch evolve. But unfortunately, we won’t have that privilege as Oliver Tree’s life was tragically cut short in a helicopter accident that left him and five others dead.
I don’t want to dwell too much on his death because his artistic output was far too colorful to dwell on its unfortunate end.
One theme that was repeatedly revisited in Oliver’s music was that he felt people would be better off with him gone and that he would be easily forgotten after his death.
However, now that Oliver Tree is no longer with us, I can confidently say that nothing is further from the truth.
RIP Oliver Tree. You’re a Santa Cruz King, a NorCal legend, an SF State alumnus and one of the most influential artists of this decade.
Thanks for making the isolation of 2020 a little easier.
