At the heart of Cabin Fever Orchestra is Graeme Cornies, a composer with 18 years experience creating popular television soundtracks who has joined forces with Kodiak Arcade for ‘No Reason To Change, ‘, a song about love and acceptance.
How did your musical project first start? Is there a story to tell about it?
Cabin Fever Orchestra grew out of a wish to explore my own musical voice in a way that my career as a composer wasn’t providing. I knew that I wanted to explore cinematic orchestral writing with live players, but the break-neck pace of series television often made that impossible. Television writing gave me countless opportunities to write for orchestra, but the resulting music was less personal expression and more musical craftsmanship in service of each scene. I wondered what I might do, if left to my own devices, playing in the same orchestral sandbox. I had my heart set on chasing the added expression and humanity possible with live players too. Cabin Fever became that outlet.
What was your first gig?
I was lucky enough to attend a public arts school as a child. That school had what they called “sharing assemblies” once a month, which gave kids in every grade the chance to perform for one another, to rack up real-world performance experience. Usually this was reserved for school projects in each discipline – drama, music, dance etc., but around seventh grade my teachers became very encouraging towards my attempts to teach myself guitar. I performed “Blackbird” by the Beatles with another friend who sang while I played guitar. That experience was likely life-altering for me. It definitely made me hungry to explore music with my friends. That singer, and another guitarist in the same grade eventually played in a band with me until the end of university. We really helped one another hone our individual creative voices in those years, and amazingly, we’re all still working in the arts.
What three words best describe your musical style and why?
Contemplative – I feel my music often elicits a vibe of quiet contemplation. There are moments of deep calm, and often, we arrive at moments that are meant to elicit a sense of wonder.
Narrative – It’s probably the television composer in me, but my music often feels as though it is telling a story.
Musical Landscapes – To me, especially in the context of orchestral writing, my pieces feel like musical landscapes. They often seem as though they are expressing some other-worldly place to my ear.
Who are your biggest musical influences?
This is always tricky, but today, my top three are probably Thomas Newman, Germaine Franco and Harry Gregson-Williams.
Tell us about your new release.
“No Reason to Change” really allowed me to marry my singer/songwriter sensibilities with my orchestral writing. Usually, my pop songs and my orchestral works are so different from one another that they don’t sound alike in the slightest, but this song represents the intersection of both of those sides of my musical voice, where a listener can hear how both projects would’ve naturally arisen from the same musical mind. I hear both sides distinctly, and I think this song somehow bridges those two distinct musical universes for me.
What inspires your lyrics?
After more than a decade of reinterpreting Fred Rogers’ material for a new generation on “Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood”, one consistent theme emerged time and again: the idea that we can be loved for who we are, uniquely, in this very moment. We don’t need to achieve anything specific or become someone else to be worthy of love. I’ve often thought that this message applies not only to children but to adults as well, who sometimes need to be reminded of the same sentiment.
“No Reason to Change” is a track about feeling fully accepted. It expresses that we can be loved for who we are right now, despite the individual imperfections we often try to conceal. The song is about gradually letting others into our inner worlds, dropping our defences in favour of mutual vulnerability, and learning to trust that this openness can make us stronger. At first glance, “No Reason to Change” might seem like a romantic love song—about building trust, acceptance, and embracing one another as individuals. That said, this song could just as easily be sung to a child, or by a child to a parent, or to anyone with whom we share our lives.
What are you band working on next?
In the coming months I’ll be recording with the Czech National Symphony Orchestra again. The CNSO were featured prominently in my 2024 releases. At some point, I also hope to explore creating immersive content for my releases – VR and AR experiences married to the music – literal imaginary places where people can interact with the music in novel ways. In theory I should be able to build what I’m imagining, but I’m guessing there are a few steep learning curves to conquer before I get there. Ideally, I will release something of this sort next year.
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