JEFF the Brotherhood has had one hell of year between releasing a critically acclaimed record and playing everywhere from Russia to the Ryman. Now they’re coming back to the Boro for a show and Q & A session about running their record label, Infinity Cat. Recently, the Murfreesboro Pulse caught up with guitarist/vocalist Jake Orrall to talk about JEFF’s hard-earned success and reflect on the years leading up to it.   

Jake Orrall doesn’t know how he got here. Or rather, the novelty of his and his brother’s success still seems to be pretty fresh to him.

He’s the elder brother and guitarist/vocalist of stoner-punk outfit JEFF the Brotherhood, whose psych-grunge swirl has hovered over Nashville for a decade, but only just begun to cloud the brains of folks on a much larger scale. Not to mention their record label—the Nashville-based Infinity Cat, which is approaching its tenth birthday—isn’t doing too bad either.

For two young twenty-somethings, that’s cause for excitement, especially because they were primarily playing basement shows in Nashville only a few years back. For young, musically inclined twenty-somethings in Murfreesboro in that same situation now, the night of Nov. 4 is cause for excitement, too.

Youth Empowerment through Arts & Humanities (YEAH), with a little help from the Tennessee Arts Commission, organized a JEFF the Brotherhood show at Walnut House Nov. 4. Jake and younger brother/drummer Jamin will preface the performance with a question-and-answer session about running Infinity Cat and doing what they do.

Sponsored by Omega Delta Psi—the MTSU RIM fraternity—and the MTSU chapter of the Audio Engineering Society, the session is free and provides anyone the opportunity to find out how these two guys, who began with more or less no idea what they were doing, successfully run a record label and still manage to tour nonstop.

Up to this year, JEFF the Brotherhood’s success story has been an even-keeled page-turner. From the time the brothers started playing together in 2001, it was a slow build from the ground up through Nashville’s underground music scene.

Since the spring release of We Are the Champions, however, the pace picked up. In September, JEFF opened for The Raconteurs at the Ryman Auditorium (which Jake refers to as the coolest venue in the country). Then in early October, they performed “Diamond Way” on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon. They’ve become endeared to the likes of Rolling Stone and SPIN, and they’ve caught on with international audiences.

Earlier in the year, the band went to Moscow to play for Vice magazine, an experience that Jake still describes with mild awe.

“It was such a big thing to fly to Moscow, play a show and fly home. We had a month-long tour of the west coast, and we were leaving the day after we got home, so we weren’t sure if we wanted to do it. But it was just such a weird idea, so we were just like, ‘Let’s do it, it will be really fun,’” Jake says.

As it turned out, the Russian crowd really went for JEFF the Brotherhood.

“It was this sold-out crazy party. We were headlining the show, and there were two Russian bands opening for us, and no one had ever heard of us, but people went crazy for us. It was great. It was a really surreal, bizarre experience—to have gotten there just through doing what we love to do, playing music. It was pretty special [laughs]. Like, weird.”

Weird, maybe, but not that surprising. Doing time in Nashville ultimately paid off in the form of a fan base of colossal proportions. When We Are the Champions, technically the band’s seventh album though it’s only the second to be widely recognized, was released, JEFF celebrated in typical fashion with a basement show in Nashville that Jake says reached “a whole new level of chaos.”

That record and subsequent show may have proved JEFF has outgrown the whole basement scene. Maybe.

“It was kind of insane, but we’ll always keep doing basement shows. Maybe not forever in Nashville…well, I can’t really see us ever stopping doing basement shows in Nashville. We’ll always do at least one a year [laughs],” Jake says.

As wee kids, Jake and Jamin were fed The Clash and The Rolling Stones by their dad, singer/songwriter and producer Robert Ellis Orrall. They moved to Nashville when Jake was five so Robert could write commercial country music.

At 10 and 12 respectively, Jamin and Jake taught themselves to play. They took part in an early shape of the late Nashville punk rock group Be Your Own Pet, after which they began putting out a few scattered explorations in music as a duo. Those first recordings were about as DIY as it gets and were what spawned Infinity Cat, which is run by the brothers, their dad and their manager.

“It started by making CD-Rs when I was in high school and Jamin was in middle school. All we knew was that we were going to punk shows and there were kids selling CD-Rs and 7-inches that they made themselves, and I guess we thought that there was no reason why we couldn’t do it [laughs]. We knew absolutely nothing about putting out records. We’ve spent the last 10 years learning by running the label, I guess,” Jake says.

“There wasn’t really anyone else who was going to put our record out, so if we wanted our stuff to come out, we had to do it ourselves,” he adds.

The first record to really strike a sweet chord was their sixth, 2009’s Heavy Days, a stripped-down wreckage of drums and heavy riffage that smells a lot like early Weezer. The following We Are the Champions two years later was like meat on the bare bones of Heavy Days; it demonstrated their ability to segue hard ’70s rock neatly with their old punk riffs.

“The lyrics with Heavy Days were written all over a long period of time, and we recorded them in three days in the studio, spread over three weeks. It was kind of like three different types of songs that all sound different, but I don’t think anyone can pick that up anymore,” Jake says.

“With We Are the Champions, half of it got written a month or two before we recorded it, and it’s more of a studio album, I guess.”

What doesn’t change is the manner in which the music takes shape. The process is little more than Jake and Jamin in a jam session, playing back the good stuff on their tape recorder and turning them into songs.

And if there’s a message in the music, it’s not in the lyrics.

“I don’t really think that’s what our sound is about,” Jake says. “It’s primarily about having fun playing music, having fun listening to music, singing loud music, whatever. Lyrics are definitely secondary. They’re just something to fill the space.”

Even if the lyrics are filler, they fit perfectly within the sound—unadorned fragments of verse about nothing in particular. Girlfriends. Hanging out. Regular stuff.

After Heavy Days, JEFF reached a musical stalemate in Music City. As unofficial kings of basement-bred slacker punk, they had nowhere else to progress within the city, so they started touring relentlessly.

“I know how we went about taking our band to the next level. I don’t know really how many other approaches there are, but there was a point where we kind of realized that it wasn’t really progressing. We both did two-year stints in college, and we eventually both decided to quit and just do the band full-time. It was big; it wasn’t just like quitting college and doing weekend tours,” Jake says.

“I have friends who do that kind of stuff where they still have band members in college who keep part-time jobs, just trying to do weekend trips up to Chicago or whatever. But when we decided to take it to the next level, we decided to totally put everything else aside. We moved out of our places, quit our jobs, put our stuff in storage and lived in the van, like, 13 months.”

Touring is the best thing JEFF the Brotherhood can possibly do. For a band with only two instrumentalists, an overwhelming amount of power generates from their spare drum and guitar setup, especially in a live performance. The sound is a powerhouse—it’s wide, it’s loud, and it’s layered with only Jamin’s incessant rhythm and Jake’s shredding.

Jake appears to appreciate a great live show just as much as he is capable of giving one himself. Being on the road as much as he is means exposure to countless artists; he rattles off some of his favorite over the months of touring, from Cave and Juiceboxx, to Quintron and Miss Pussycat and Infinity Cat’s own Diarrhea Planet.

Between the constant touring and literally coming home to work (Infinity Cat operates out of Jake’s house) where he oversees the recording process and gets new artists on-board, there’s got to be some wear-and-tear.

“When I get home from tour and I wake up, it’s like I’m at work. It’s hard to draw that line and know when to stop. I basically don’t have any free time, ever,” Jake says. “But I also really enjoy it. I’m really passionate about it, so…”

Maybe the fact that Infinity Cat and JEFF the Brotherhood built slowly over 10 years accounts for Jake’s level-headedness about whatever milestone the band reaches, and maybe a sense of temporariness in regards to the band. The band would certainly have plenty of pearls of wisdom to share with any local musicians in the Murfreesboro deadlock.

When pressed for advice for those musicians, Jake offers the JEFF M.O.

“Our plan was to go up to New York, play as many shows as we can in a week in New York, and then do two shows in Nashville every month for six months, then start talking to booking agents and see if anyone else had noticed or whatever,” he says. “We got a booking agent and said, ‘We don’t work, we don’t have places to live, just keep us on the road indefinitely.’ We were booking three months in advance, and it was like, ‘Wow, we’re still on the road,’ and we did that for about a year and a half. Then we were able to scale it back a little it and move into cheap places, and that’s where we are now.”

Their success story is obviously one of manual labor, rather than catching on in a couple months, playing on the late shows too fast, banking and tanking as is the case with too many fad bands.

“It’s just a lot of work [laughs]. Just go into it knowing you’re going to bust your ass for a couple of years if you want to get anywhere. I mean, there’s a lot of bands that come up in six months within forming and are playing sold-out tours and all that stuff, but I don’t think those types of careers really last very long, because they’re not really building a solid foundation of a fan base to fall back on if someone pulls the rug out from under you or whatever.”

Should a rug of any kind be pulled out from under JEFF the Brotherhood, they would likely fall into the arms of some very devoted Nashville basement dwellers, in a manner of speaking.

Now JEFF is working on another record, which they demoed last week and plan to record in January. The album is half-written at the moment, and Jake says they’re unsure at this point where he and Jamin are going with it.

“It’s definitely different [laughs]. But I think it’s different in the same way that We Are the Champions is from Heavy Days. It’s just sort of the natural progression, I think.”

That’s the thing about JEFF the Brotherhood—they always seem just as excited as their fans to see where they’ll end up next. I tell him we’re looking forward to the record.

“Me too,” he says. “I can’t wait.”

JEFF the Brotherhood plays Walnut House, 116 North Walnut Street, on Nov. 4. The Q & A begins at 7:30 p.m. and the performance is at 8:30. The show cover is $10, though students receive a $2 discount when they present their student ID.