Oliver Tree Deals Art

For Oliver Tree, having a hand in every aspect of his career is vital. He enjoys wearing the many hats required to maintain a successful career as a recording artist and budding filmmaker.

When we connect by phone, he’s a week away from releasing his debut album, “Ugly is Beautiful,” a body of work that is introspective, reflective and intelligently fun. Behind the work is a creator who is not only extremely self-aware of his comedic persona and role as an entertainer, but a man who has built his career on entertaining himself first.
Before we dive in, I’d read that you made the music video for “Bury Me Alive” for six bucks. Is that true?

Oliver Tree: Truth is, I wasn’t even planning on shooting a video. I was actually shooting some promotional pieces for the album and had built prosthetics out of this play doh material. We’d spent a lot of time making them and thought they looked pretty crazy. We had the camera, the story cam gear, and were at a location that had incredible train tracks outside. I was like, “Fuck it, let’s just drop a camera on me and shoot a one-shot-take video,” and I just choreographed things as I went. It was purely spur of the moment and I just kept doing it until it became what you see in the final video.