“Bright Lights,” the first song from O.K. Company’s new album Stronglove, is built on a set of luscious, chiming piano chords that at first has only a hi-hat keeping the backbeat for accompaniment. But that’s more than enough to buoy the singer, who delivers lyrics that speak of a different time and our own. “All alone on a crowded afternoon,” she sings. “I miss you lately / because everybody needs somebody.”
The song gains momentum as it goes, both in the urgency of the singer’s voice and in the instruments, which become more and more active until they hand things over to a soulful lead guitar. The song goes out on a ruminative jam that dissolves the rhythm even as it pushes it forward. It’s all the voices in the band speaking together.
O.K. Company at Cafe Nine.
“Bright Lights” is an altogether fitting introduction to Stronglove and to the New Haven-based band — formerly known as The Let Loose — which in a few short years grew into an Elm City favorite as its band members steadily weathered the pandemic to keep writing songs and keep growing as musicians.
Few are more pleased than LaQruishia Gill, O.K. Company’s vocalist. “How am I the lead singer in a band? How did we get here?” she laughed in recounting the band’s story and her own journey to it.
Originally from the Dallas-Fort Worth area, “I grew up surrounded by family members who could sing,” Gill said, but “I never saw myself as a singer. For the longest time I just sang in the car, or in choir. I thought it was something I did for fun. I didn’t really start singing much until I moved up here.”
Gill moved to New Haven in 2013 to attend Yale Divinity School. “When I finished, I decided to stay,” she said. She grew up in a sprawling, suburban place, and in New Haven’s relative density, “I started to like being somewhere where you can be close to people you know and like.” She also joined the congregation at Elm City Vineyard, which “happened to be full of really talented singers and musicians,” she said. One of them was worship pastor Tina Colón-Williams, who is “a terrific singer in her own right.” Colón-Williams had gigs in a few New Haven venues — BAR, Trinity Bar — and invited Gill to join her. It also turned out “there were a lot of musicians at the church who were playing out in New Haven,” Gill said, and she started going to their shows, too.
Then “I started going to an open mic with some friends down at Pacific Standard Tavern” — the then-regular R&B jam known as Soul Du Jour — and “I would sing random songs very poorly. I was very shy and nervous, and surrounded by all these super-talented musicians.” But “they were so welcoming, and I kept going back.”
Soul Du Jour is where Gill connected with Joshua Wyrtzen, Austin Morrison, and Pete Greco, who play keys, drums, and guitar in O.K. Company. Wyrtzen and Morrison are also from the Dallas-Fort Worth area. “That was an instant connection,” Gill said, and as a “nervous and shy singer” at the time, she welcomed it. Before she knew it, she said, “I was singing regularly with a consistent group of people, gigging, and writing, and becoming friends.”
The group’s members also discovered they had a knack for creating original material. “Josh does most of the songwriting,” Gill said, describing Wyrtzen as “a songwriting machine. Has this person ever had writer’s block? I haven’t witnessed it. He just cranks out songs like it’s nothing.” Wyrtzen brings the songs to the band as melodies and harmonic structures, written on guitar or piano. The band’s members then collaborate in fleshing them out. “There’s more than enough room to write and rewrite and change chords and build, and it takes on whatever shape,” Gill said. “It goes wherever it goes.” And “when we don’t have any show on the calendar, we’re hashing out new songs or seeing what covers we want to throw in the mix.”
The two years of pandemic time thus was a creative period for the band, which practiced socially distanced at the State House before moving back into its former rehearsal space attached to Morrison’s concrete polishing business. As Gill recalled band members saying, “we don’t have gigs. Nobody has gigs. We might as well work on new music.”
O.K. Company released A Mini EP in June 2021, but by then they had worked up many more songs than that, including the songs on Stronglove. In the cases of “Bright Lights,” “Slow Sunday,” and “Stronglove.” “I remember talking to Josh about how he wrote those, and a lot of those are a reflection of old New York, new New York, and New York during the pandemic,” Gill said. “The subject matter is nostalgic, and maybe that translates into how the song was written.”
By this, Gill meant the album’s drawing from the R&B and soul of the 1960s and 1970s, a sound that remains fresh and relevant and continues to renew itself as the years go by. With “Stronglove,” Gill said, “I kind of pitched a specific genre to Josh, and he clearly knocked it out of the park.” That genre was Motown, as filtered through the 2017 gospel album Let Them Fall in Love by Cece Winans. “Her album was all an homage to the Motown era,” Gill said. “It’s obviously a really good album, but you can immediately tell that it’s Motown and that it feels really good.”
Part of the reason O.K. Company had two releases in 2021 was that they knew their bass player, James Smith, was leaving New Haven. They recorded basic tracks for Stronglove in May at the State House. “We wanted to see how many songs we could lay the foundation for before our bass player moved,” Gill said. “Then we could finish building it out.” By the time Smith left, “we had gotten all seven of those songs tracked with keys, drums, and bass.” With the goal of having a new album out by the end of the year, they finished recording in the fall and uploaded it to online services on Dec. 21. “As soon as we finished mastering I didn’t take a beat,” Gill said. “We wanted to get it out and we did it.”
O.K. Company celebrated the release of Stronglove at Cafe Nine on Dec. 30, with new bass player Lamar Smith now in the lineup, sharing a bill with Laini and Wildfire and Finn Henry. “I’m grateful, and I think we’re all proud of ourselves for how we’ve improved over the past handful of years,” Gill said. “We’re consistently getting better, and that’s part of why putting together this album was so meaningful for us. We’ve been working hard and we wanted to share a part of that with other people.”
With two releases in a year under the band’s collective belt, Gill anticipates that O.K. Company will only continue developing, with more releases and live shows. “I’m just going to ride this thing until the wheels fall off,” she said. “It’s just so much more fun than I could have imagined.”
O.K. Company’s Stronglove is available on several streaming platforms.