Richmond, California-based artist Victor Mitrani, aka Little Oil, joined BFF.fm DJ MJ on West of Twin Peaks Radio last Sunday to discuss his brand new LP, Twelve Songs. The new record is a genre-fluid tour de force that's been hitting the BFF.fm charts since it dropped. Victor and MJ talk about embracing multiple genres and multitudes, the recording process for the new record, discovering The Beatles via mom, and what’s next for Little Oil. Listen to the whole conversation here, and enjoy a few clips from the convo below!

MJ: I love Twelve Songs! The East Bay Express said that they felt the LP highlights “the entire history of pop music.” Would you go that far in describing it that way?

Victor: Oh yeah, it gets everyone there, yeah. Frank Sinatra to Lady Gaga. [Laughs]

It does explore a lot of different sounds, but I still come around to the grand genre that I call cosmic alt-folk.

I think I have a hard time, because, you know, what's the first thing somebody asks you when you tell them you play music? “Oh, really? What kind?” And you're like, “Oh, well, it's sort of this, and I sort of came upon…what do I say…psych-Americana was one of the ways I’ve said it. And then I think on the first album, which is a little more punk, it was psych-punk-Americana or something like that. But, yeah, cosmic alternative country also works quite nicely.

For Twelve Songs, was the recording process any different than for your debut solo record? Because you have quite a few collaborators on this album with you.

I guess on the first album, it was a group of songs that I felt didn't need a lot of adornment, that were kind of simpler and just the vocals and the guitar and something simple behind it would kind of carry it off. And I had this group of other songs where I thought that setup was not enough. I need something else, something more instrumentally, to lift some of these songs to another level that I always had in my mind. On this album, I tackled a lot of those songs. And just through the network of asking friends, “Hey, do you know a fiddle player?” These are people I never meet in person, almost, and I just email them, and you send it off with the best intentions. And sometimes it's awesome. The great thing about it being your project is you can kind of Steely Dan it and say, “No, that's no good.” And, you know, if you're paying someone, you still pay them. But there isn't that emotional baggage of being in a band with someone and telling them I don't quite like what you did there, you know? So I would say that's the main difference. And then the other part, the big difference of this is I had somebody, a different friend who was a little more experienced mix it, and he gave it this sonic clarity that was really cool.

For a solo artist, it has such a full band sound.

I love arrangements. I love all the things working together. I have, like, a pretty good idea of how things can work well together, especially for my songs, which can be kind of quirky. I try to make them as simple as possible, but when I feel it's lacking in something, that's when I'll add something in there and try to make it work, you know? And with this album, I needed more. [Laughs]

You mention the word “quirky,” and that was a term that came to me when I was listening to it. There's just a style that I can't put my finger on other than to say “quirky,” because where you think it's going to go, it doesn't quite go. It goes in a different direction. And one of my favorite songs on the entire album was long ago. One of my favorite songs on the album is “Long Ago,” which was waltz-like, circus-like, but then it turns quirky, then it turns jammy. That’s what I appreciated about all of the pieces: they didn’t go where I expected them to.

That’s really cool, thank you for saying that. That's nice to hear that you like “Long Ago” because that was one where I was like, “Can I pull this off?” So I'm happy that you like that one. The way that I approach making a song, and especially recording a song, is I try to listen like a listener. It's not so personal that I'm trying to make it like a cathartic experience solely for myself. I am trying to surprise the listener. I'm trying to make it something enjoyable for someone to listen to, while also me getting my personal enjoyment or whatever emotion out of it.

Little Oil aka Victor Mitrani

Tell me a little bit about your background and your music listening background. You were born in Mexico City, but moved at what age to SoCal?

When I was seven years old, I moved to the United States. I think, like a lot of kids who grew up in the 90s, a lot a lot of hip hop, you know, that was kind of like the first music that I would say I kind of got into on my own. Then, funnily enough, and back in the Napster era, if you remember that, somehow my mom figured out how to download some songs, and I was just like, “What the heck are these songs doing on our computer?” So I clicked on one of them, and it was, “Your Mother Should Know” by The Beatles, and it starts out with those harmonies, and I thought it was just like the most magical kind of sound in the world. I think I was maybe in eighth grade or something. So that led me to The Beatles, Bob Dylan, all the classic rock stuff. And then, you know, as one does, you follow back to the blues, back to folk, Robert Johnson, Son House, The Carter Family. I love all that stuff. Jimmy Rogers, Hank Williams…and then the other big part of my musical kind of DNA, I would say, is skateboarding. Skateboarding videos are like music videos. You don't have any preconceived notion; if it's a cool part, it could be a jazz song or something, and all of a sudden you're listening to this music. So I would say skateboarding was a big, you know, opener to my musical tastes. It led me to punk rock and all that stuff, too.

One of the other standouts, I thought, was “We’re Lost” because it's so stripped back and it does accentuate your wonderful guitar playing. I know you layer your own guitar work, but is that you with the Django Reinhardt-type guitar? I was expecting you to tell me that you've been studying guitar since you were, like, eight years old, and, you know, majored in guitar at university because I was so taken back by your wonderful guitar playing.>

Oh, thank you. Thank you very much. I'll take from any genre I can. Like, I don't have any prejudice about, like, “Ooo, that's a nice little lick and it's jazz. How can I make that work within the context of my music?” Or I’ll throw a country lick or something from a punk song…it’s all just trying to use anything to cover up for your own limitations, right? [Laughs] So yeah, that's all me putting the guitar.

I'm seeing music change quite significantly, where people like you, artists like you, aren't the same thing from album to album like it used to be. And I'm wondering if that's because the generation of music buyers now, let's put it that way, don't care what genre it is anymore. It's just if they like it. What do you attribute that to? The lanes are so blurred now.

I mean, I think that's kind of part of it, like the blurred musical genres in general. You know, Beyonce is releasing country songs, that kind of thing. But at the same time, some of the greatest bands like The Beatles were genre-less too. What genre were they? I think that's a testament to, like, that's one of the things I really look for. Like, Ween. Ween is one of my favorite bands, and they can do anything. But it’s funny that you mentioned that, because, you know, you hear about or you see on Instagram some of these music marketing people give you advice, like, “Quit putting all of your different kinds of music under one moniker,” like, “be specialized.” I've sort of noticed that I think…I think you would be a lot more successful if you were just like, “I am psych garage.” I still think it's very difficult to, you know, not be one genre, you know?

But I don't think people listen that way. People don't peg their genres, I don't think. They're listening to all sorts of different stuff. When you mentioned the Instagram thing, this is a great conversation to have, because they're just telling you to do that for their algorithm, right? Not for the listener.

Totally. No, you're 100% right. Like, I hate it. [Laughs] I'm like, “It’s probably good advice. But like, what? What I'm gonna, like, have a different name for the folk songs and what am I gonna wear a different hat? Am I gonna wear a different outfit?” I'm not interested in that. Like I said, I like when artists, you know, contain multitudes.

Listen to the rest of MJ’s chat with Victor here. Twelve Songs is out now!