

Hey Michael, tell us a bit about Half an Orange.

Half an Orange features Ryan Chadwick, Dan Hanna, Andrew Spellman, and myself (Michael Maloof).

Ryan and I went to Catholic school together starting in second grade. Ryan actually taught me how to play guitar and was the first person I felt comfortable singing in front of. All four of us ended up in the same fraternity in college where we had a crew of guys playing music together every night. Dan and I co-founded a music start-up out of college that focused on music analytics for indie bands. When the start-up folded we started focusing on recording and releasing our own music with Ryan and Andrew.

Where did the name come from?

I came up with the band name while living in Brazil. It’s an expression in Portuguese where everyone is one half of an orange and waiting to find the other half of the orange so they can feel complete. If you’re just half an orange you’re still looking for that someone or something in life that makes you whole. We took it more on the something, as opposed to the someone, where at times we feel totally lost and are just half an orange.

What was the inspiration behind ‘I need U To Stay’?

I wrote a lot of our lyrics while living in Rio de Janeiro for a year. The first week there my girlfriend and I had our bank accounts frozen and we hadn’t yet found a place to live. We basically ended up homeless there for a week, frantically trying to make friends to have places to sleep and spending all our time on the beach. Despite the struggles of being in a new country with no money, home, phone, nor jobs we had a blast because we had each other. This ended up being the basis for the lyrics in “I Need U To Stay”.

What’s on the horizon for Half an Orange fans?

We are currently working with well known Cincinnati producer, OTR, for a collaboration on our next song, Stems. We just finished filming the music video for it with director Jon Kimble, who before us had just wrapped up a commercial with Lebron James. We are also running a campaign to give back to our fans. Anyone who emails us at halfanorangemusic@gmail.com will get sent some free band merchandise. The internet is this crazy place that has helped our music succeed so we wanted to find a way to tell the people on it “thank you”.

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