Garrison and Orange Island Reunion Show

10/06/23: Garrison, Orange Island, and Pilot to Gunner @ The Middle East - Cambridge, MA

GARRISON and ORANGE ISLAND will be playing a special reunion show on October 6, 2023 at The Middle East Downstairs. This will be both band's first live appearances in over ten years. Garrison will perform with their original line up, playing songs from The Bend Before the Break and A Mile in Cold Water. Orange Island will be celebrating their recent reissue of ‘One Night Stay’ and playing songs from throughout the band’s history. Tickets are on sale now!

Friday, October 6, 2023
GARRISON, ORANGE ISLAND, PILOT TO GUNNER, SINALOA, and NOT BAD NOT WELL 
@ The Middle East Downstairs, Cambridge, MA.
$18 Advance / $20 Door / 8PM. [TICKETS]

Joseph Grillo from Garrison and Chuck Young from Orange Island reflect on their thoughts on playing live again after so long.

GARRISON: Some of us hadn't spoken in over a decade, not for animosity but simple happenstance and circumstance. After Iodine Records reissued the Bend Before the Break EP we would get on some collective zoom calls and reminisce over the past in between speaking of the present. It was so nice to speak to everyone again and remember why we chose these people to spend such a pivotal moment of our lives together in the first place. Simply put, my old bandmates are wonderful, inspiring people and I am better for knowing them. We had one rule, we would only do reunion shows if they would be fun. We all have only so much time as our lives have shifted and the responsibilities of families and careers take over so if we were going to be doing these shows then we needed to make sure we enjoyed them. Operating under that parameter we were fortunate enough to have our old pals in Orange Island also have a similar take on playing, and having the exceptional Pilot to Gunner on the shows only made the whole idea more perfect. So we put together a show on a Friday evening at a venue we had played countless times in the late 90s, and now we invite friends both old and new to have a drink and a memory with us, or perhaps make a new memory to look back on one day and smile about. ~ Joseph / Garrison

ORANGE ISLAND: I very honestly didn’t think we’d ever do another reunion show. First, I didn’t think it would be physically possible. I have also always been sure that there’d be at least one holdout (& there was a very real chance that I -my relationship to the person I was when we wrote these songs too strained; the subconscious expectations I always seemed to have about revisiting him & what he cared about too heavy -would be that holdout!). But when we geared up to do the One Night Stay release & the idea popped up in a conversation the five of us were having, every single one of us seemed down? And excited? It then became a juggling act of logistics and/or discussions about what we all wanted to get out of it, what situation seemed best case scenario. That scenario just happened to present itself when Garrison thought of us for their date which just so happened to coincide with the consensus we had all come to about what would mean the most to us: being in a room together as consistently as possible to potentially tap into whatever special sauce seemed to manifest itself whenever our various chemicals and guts would occupy the same space. It’s fun to have this shared history with each other & the popcorn kernels we left in the form of sounds to always find our way back. It’s fun to have a good relationship to what we made when we made it & healthy expectations about what it means to dedicate ourselves to the energy baked within it. Mostly though it’s just fun to smile at your friends when your old man muscles clumsily find their memory over & over again. We look forward to showing our friends the culmination of that fun come October. ~ Chuck Young / Orange Island