William Cullen Hart (Elephant 6 / Olivia Tremor Control) has died

I am deeply heartbroken on this day of celebration of a new Olivia Tremor Control release, to announce that my dear friend and Elephant 6 Recording Co. co-founder, W. Cullen Hart (Will to his friends), passed away this morning of natural causes, suddenly, peacefully, and in a very happy mood around the release of the two new OTC songs.

Will was a genius experimental and psychedelic pop musician, a brilliant and prolific visual artist who sketched and made collage art every second of every day, on every object within reach. He was a lifelong four-tracker, tape looper, spontaneous poet, sound collage constructor, deconstructionist of musical instruments, and a very talented composer of pop songs since we were teenagers. I heard about Will before I met him, a common friend told me, “You and Will Hart are exactly alike!” (We were both very animated and loud.) I borrowed a cassette copy of Kiss Dynasty from Joey Foreman – future projectionist for the OTC – in middle school, knowing it had been loaned to Joey by Will, and loved it. Will and I subsequently met at a Cheap Trick concert, introduced by a common friend (and future bandmate to both of us) Jeff Mangum, and became youthful competitors in music, and then the closest of friends. I did return the Dynasty tape some years later.

Will was co-leader with Bill Doss of the Olivia Tremor Control (whom I co-produced), bandleader of the Circulatory System, and was the spiritual leader of the Elephant 6 art community that exploded in Athens, Georgia, in the late 1990s. He was my partner in crime in our teens and early twenties, my dear friend, roommate, bandmate, and we pursued a vision of art and music together our whole lives, to this very day, that we hatched as children – together. Will was infinitely chatty, infinitely funny, infinitely expressive, infinitely creative. He was energetic, sweet, tender, earnest, alternately totally chill and totally explosive. Will suffered from multiple sclerosis for almost two decades, which gradually reduced his mobility, his ability to play guitar, and his ability to tour – but he kept up his productivity, his songwriting, his recording and his art, and lived life in a state of heightened creativity. He was infinitely loved by me, and by his bandmates and the Elephant 6 and Athens communities.

I am in shock at the loss of my friend. I honor Will today, by filling in a piece of his legend. When Olivia Tremor Control co-leader Bill Doss – also my dear friend and Apples in stereo bandmate – passed away in 2012, the OTC were in full-swing recording an epic new concept album, with Bill and talented Derek Almsted working together to engineer and assemble the ambitious double album. On Bill’s home studio wall was a chart filled with abstract poetry and arrows, that was supposedly a map to the album. I signed on to help finish the production – and I was moving to Atlanta for math graduate school at Emory. The plan was: weekends in Athens until the record was done. I heard all the rough mixes, went over studio notes of Bill and Will, and we had a plan to finish. But tragically, the weekend I moved to Atlanta was the weekend that Bill died, the very day we moved in. He was completely invested in the new OTC record and filled with inspiration, and we all vowed to finish the work. But grief held us back for years. It holds me back still. “Bill has gone to the mountains,” Will said.

Will never lost focus, even in his grief, on the masterpiece he and Bill had started. He kept the vision and the concept fresh. But he is not a studio engineer and had debilitating MS so he really needed the whole village to support the effort. During the filming of the Elephant 6 documentary, C. B. Stockfleth was coming to Athens and Will had become increasingly passionate to work on the OTC again. We set up a session at musician-engineer Jason NeSmith’s home studio to start to fill in the necessary overdubs and look toward finishing one or more OTC tracks. Two songs, “Garden of Light” (Bill’s song) and “The Same Place” (Will’s song), were almost done so we focused on those, and got the overdubs finished from Bill’s original task list, plus a few new pieces with Will and me overseeing. It was a huge effort, the whole band came in to play, my brother-in-law and collaborator Craig Morris came in to help engineer, and we felt a sense of great momentum. This is captured really nicely in the film, it was a very moving recording experience. Even so, grief and disorganization made proceeding hard from there. It took years just to finish the two songs.

Along with Will and Bill, and Derek who engineered the basic tracks and had done much work on the OTC album, Jason NeSmith is the hero of the finishing of the two OTC songs. Jason and Will worked together on mixing the two songs, sending mixes back and forth to me for comment, and then started to make progress towards other unfinished OTC tracks. Thanks to Jason, Will gained momentum, and new enthusiasm, and their studio collaboration blossomed over the last two years, even with MS affecting Will’s mobility more and more – he pushed forward to the finish happily, bravely. I am so thankful to Derek and to Jason for their engineering work on the final OTC album. May the history of this classic band record the vital role each of them played as partners to Bill and to Will. And Kelly Hart, Will’s wife and his co-manager of the rebooted Elephant 6 label, is the hero of bringing the songs into the world. These beautiful songs – perhaps among the best psychedelic pop songs ever recorded – exist today, they are on BandCamp and on the E6 documentary vinyl LP that came out today, and Kelly told me that this morning Will was excited and happy to see people were downloading it. Today is a day of victory for W. Cullen Hart – his last day represented a triumph. Today is the day that Will’s perseverance, his sincerity, his struggle with MS, and his devotion to Bill and their common vision, bears fruit.

My dear friend, my brother, my co-conspirator, my E6 co-founder, I have always loved you and will always love you with the same intensity I had when we were young. You were so amazing, I can’t even believe you existed. I will miss your love and your humor and your energy and your brilliance forever. I will endeavor to help your bandmates finish your work, and I will forever be grateful for your friendship and your love – my sweet friend and my greatest artistic influence. May your journey to the mountains be beautiful.