Genre(s): Emo, folk
Location: Asheville, NC
Run Over by a Horse (ROBAH, for short) is, in singer/guitarist Oliver Lee Finch’s words, “serendipitous.” “Just like being run over by an actual horse would be.”
Hilarious comparison aside, it’s hard not to agree. In just over a year, Oliver (he/him) has seen the band grow from a “two singers, two guitars” duo with Lily (they/she) to a tightknit four-piece, active in the Asheville music scene, with Lily’s sister Molly (she/her) on bass and Ray (they/them) on drums.
When Foxing announced local openers for their “Foxing in 2024” tour, ROBAH got booked for the Carrboro, NC date on October 24th — despite the band not having any recorded material to share. That didn’t stop the indie emo veterans from seeing something special in this Western NC blend of Midwestern emo, folk, and math rock.
Unfortunately, Hurricane Helene swept in a week later, throwing their biggest show to date in doubt. I had reached out to the band for this interview the morning Helene hit, but we didn’t schedule until power and cell service returned over 3 weeks later.
A last-minute curveball came with the show’s sudden cancellation due to Foxing’s van breaking down five hours before doors were to open. That didn’t stop ROBAH, though, as they found a Halloween house show to play at in Carrboro the next night — which even got boosted by Foxing on Instagram.
This was less of an interview and more of a lighthearted chat amid much heaviness, one that felt simultaneously like making new queer friends and catching up with old ones.
What have each of y’all been listening to lately?
Lily: I feel like the tone was set by the flood vibes that are happening in Asheville right now, so we listened to a lot of John Prine while driving the other day.
Any songs or albums in particular?
Lily: Nothing really, it was like two or three albums.
Oliver: “Sam Stone” was the standout for me, certainly. I love that song, and it also makes me want to throw up.
I love the new Foxing record. I also just got three new CDs, one of which is Friction, Baby by Better Than Ezra, in my car. That’s like my dad’s music. [laughs]
Ray: Yesterday, I got stoned, walked my dog around, and listened to some Erykah Badu: “American Promise”; “… & On”; “I Want You”.
Also, I want to mention Satisfied ‘N Tickled Too by Taj Mahal because it’s the best album in the world. It crosses every genre, it’s pretty, and you can tell he’s satisfied throughout the album. He’s just doing whatever the fuck he wants.
Molly: I have been listening a lot to Bill Withers. “Can We Pretend” is a song that I’ve been playing often. It’s kind of a bummer, which is the general vibe in town.
Also, Lily and I are sisters, and we grew up in Raleigh. There’s a local band from our childhood called Nathan Asher and the Infantry, and I’ve been listening to their album Sex Without Love often.
What were your introductions to music, whether starting to listen to music on your own, falling in love with bands, or wanting to play music and go from there? What was that early journey for each of you?
Oliver: I can’t remember a time when I didn’t have my dreams of musicianhood or whatever. I feel like that has been my singular “early life to present life” aspiration to make music and do a song and dance like a little clown for people.
The youth moment that I remember discovering a band just by myself, with no parental influence or anything, and being like, “Wait… this shit rocks,” is when Save Rock and Roll by Fall Out Boy came out. And then I had a prolonged Fall Out Boy era. I’m still in it, I guess. A lot of the stuff that they do got me excited about music in a different way. It was the first time I had something of myself, not somebody else.
Ray: Many of my earliest memories are of music, mostly the album All in All by Earth, Wind & Fire. My mom would always play that. I remember driving back from gymnastics with my mom and listening to the song “Serpentine Fire”.
I also had this crazy dream when I was three, where I woke up to the closet door opening, the light turning on, and the top shelf banging violently. I vividly remember “Jupiter” playing. My parents came in to see if I was okay after this nightmare, and all I could say was, “Shelfie sharped me.” I had to keep the closet door closed for the next 12 years. [laughs]
Lily: I started playing banjo in middle school, and that was a foot in the door musically for me.
The scene in Raleigh was really supportive. I was playing a lot of bluegrass music and then getting into punk music, and I felt like Raleigh and the Triangle could feed that for me simultaneously. I started being in a band in high school. Since then, I’ve wanted to be in a band as often as I can.
Molly: I came to the bass like many people do: I played guitar, everyone in the world played guitar, and someone had to do the bass. And I love to be a martyr, so I did it. But then I discovered that it’s way cooler, much more fun, and people respect you more.
Oliver: There’s a different mystique.
Molly: And you’re also harder to replace.
My buddy Phil Smith (of YABAI!) and I started as bassists for the same reasons. You always need someone to play the bass or drums.
Oliver: The bass and drums deficit is real. They find you. Lily and I started as a “two singers, two guitarists” band. And we were like, “Oh, where can we find bass and drums?” And it did arrive.
Most of y’all live together now. I feel like that has to be conducive for being able to get together and jam easily.
Lily: Sometimes, it’s band mode, and other times, it’s roommate or friend mode. The boundaries get set, but it is nice to live with the people you make music with.
Oliver: The hurricane has, in my opinion, been conducive to friend mode. Especially with Ray, our non-roommate. Now that we’re doing work, not for money, I feel like there are many more opportunities to spend time together, and we’re not just like, “We have to practice because this show is coming up!” We were in a cycle of meeting up to practice and maybe eating dinner together but not hanging out.
As much as we’re living in a nightmare scenario of a climate disaster, we have had time to chill, get to know each other, and hear stories like “Shelfie sharped me.”
How do you all approach writing your songs? Do each of you bring a song to the table and workshop it? Does it stem from jams?
Molly: Pretty often, it’s one person coming in with something that is mostly complete or the first bits of something, and then everyone is workshopping their parts and offering their input. We’ve had maybe one or two more collaborative songs.
Oliver: We jam a lot at band practice but have not written a song from that yet. But all that jamming for no reason guides us when it comes to workshop time.
Molly: We’re on the verge of transforming jam into song.
Given the variety of what y’all have been listening to lately and what I’ve gathered from your respective upbringings, who are your influences—individually or as a group—for the band’s sound?
Molly: I often think about folk music and traditions. Just before this call, I was saying how the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack significantly influenced me.
Ray: We talk a lot about how everyone brings something that’s their own. Molly’s the jazz guy, Oliver’s the emo guy, Lily’s the bluegrass guy.
Molly: You’re the funkhead.
Ray: Yeah, I’m the funk guy. I guess I don’t listen to or play music like we do in Run Over by a Horse except for here. I don’t feel like I’m significantly influenced by the kind of music similar to what we play.
Even if the sound that you produce together is different from what you usually listen to typically, do you see ways that your funk influences come out in the way that you play or do you think that this is an organically different thing?
Ray: Asking the tough questions here, huh? [laughs]
That is a good point, though. I was trying to write lyrics for a song that I brought to the group for a while, and everything felt dumb. Then I went on Instagram and asked people for their favorite lyricists and why, which gave me a bunch of good influences, including one artist I love, Sampha. He’s one of my favorite artists, and his lyrics always move me.
Ultimately, I feel like I slightly copied his style to finally find the lyrics I was looking for in that song.
Lily: We have our respective musical backgrounds, but I think we meet each other in the middle in an interesting way. It’s refreshing to collaborate on music with people making noise that is unfamiliar to me; working in sonic movement that is not like what I’m used to hearing all the time is challenging but pleasant.
We are part of a scene in Asheville with other indie bands that take a lot of liberties, and it’s nice to be a part of it and have friends around town who are also making music that’s kind of fusion. They’re just doing whatever they want.
Do y’all want to name-drop some of your favorite local bands?
Oliver: My favorite musician in Asheville is Pagan Rage, who is also our friend, admittedly. I think everything she does is so fucking sick.
Lily: I really like Aunt Ant. Also, gotta shout out Pagan Rage’s sibling, Joel, who’s in an excellent band called Convalescent.
Molly: As the designated jazz head of the band, Gorm is a local band that, admittedly, we are also friends with. They do a jazz fusion situation that I’m a big fan of.
Also, to shout out a band from the Triangle, I love Truth Club. I think they’re the biggest thing to happen to the North Carolina indie scene.
Oliver: I’m not from the Triangle, but Lily and Molly put me on to Truth Club. We just saw them at Hopscotch a bunch, and that was tight.
Ray: Odd Squad is a crazy metal meets drums and bass duo that sounds like seven people on stage. Terrordomers is an amazing alternative hip-hop group in town; they make their own beats, and their lyrics are fire, as one would say.
I’m also in another group called TOADHAND. We’re a sci-fi, corporate, satirical theater mixed with music group, and we have immersive, anti-capitalist art performances.
How has your live performance progressed as you’ve played out more and made great local band friends?
Oliver: Can I do our origin story?!
Lily: Please go right ahead.
Oliver: So Lily and I both worked at different summer camps. In the summer of 2023, we met at Fierce Flix and worked together again at Girls Rock Asheville. We kept being like, “Should we start a camp band? That would be so funny,” and then we did that. We started jamming and were like, “This rocks, and it feels awesome, so we should keep doing it.” So we became roommates.
At the same time, my friend was planning this weird, awesome event about death. She was like, “Oliver, knowing that you’re in this new band, do you want to play this event I’m having?” We were down and wrote a song for it. By that time, we had put together three songs. For me, that was the first song I ever wrote in my whole life. And Lily brought an older song that they were just finishing.
Lily: It was one of those songs you work on for five years and keep in your back pocket.
I hadn’t been making music with anyone for some time. Last summer was like meeting Oliver, becoming close friends, becoming roommates, writing these songs together, and bringing up old songs that hadn’t seen the light of day for months or years.
And then we played a morbid, grief-filled death event.
Oliver: It was awesome, though. Because it sold out, we got to do a second one, which was also fantastic.
Then we jammed with Molly and wondered why we had not played together the whole time. It was so ridiculous. Lily and I had a good sidebar about whether we should invite Molly to join the band. And then we did. It was goofy that we hadn’t done that before.
Lily: And once you’re a three-piece, you might as well make it a four-piece. We were expanding the sound of this band and wanted to flesh things out fully. But we were in such a deficit of drummers. What were we going to do?
Oliver: We all agreed that we wouldn’t beg. We would not find any old drummer or hit up every drummer we knew. We were on the same page that the drummer would arrive.
Molly: I remember being worried that we were looking for this unicorn drummer who doesn’t exist. And then there was Ray.
Oliver: Who asked to join, by the way. They saw us play a couple of times and were like, “This rocks. Can we jam?”
Ray: I saw the band play at this poetry and music event at Static Age Records. They played their song called “Old Yeller”, where they all scream at the end and shout that they’re pissed off. I was like, “I’m pissed off too. This music is moving me. And I don’t see a drummer.” Then I hit them up on Instagram to ask if they needed a drummer, and they said, “Yes!”
Lily: On our end, it was like, “Finally!” It all worked out as planned.
Ray: I didn’t know that y’all were hunting on the hunt for a drummer at that time.
Oliver: We were like, “What are we going to do? Audition drummers? That sounds embarrassing.” And then you wanted to jam, and it was perfect, so we didn’t have to audition anyone.
I think Run Over by a Horse is serendipitous like that a lot of the time. Just like being run over by an actual horse would be. [laughs]
That said, we’ve only been for a year, so our origin story is still unfolding.
Ray: This show is about to be a key element of the origin story.
Oliver: This is the most exciting thing that’s ever happened to me in my whole life.
Ray: Oliver has a framed photo of Conor Murphy on the wall.
Oliver: Yeah, on the Smidley tour around a year ago, they ran out of merch and Conor Murphy was like, “No problem. I’ll just sell framed headshots of myself and sign them.” My little brother and I have matching ones.
I hung him up in the house. He’s like our Mother Mary, watching over the band practice room. When you see videos of us at band practice on Instagram from above, the camera is next to him. So you’re getting the Conor Murphy POV of what it looks like at the Run Over by a Horse house.
What was the experience like submitting your music, having Foxing reach out, and booking the show?
Oliver: As the band communications guy, I asked permission from Lily and Molly before I did it. Ray, I don’t remember where you were. [laughs]
We don’t have any music out, so I sent them a YouTube video of us playing at the Static Age record store. I didn’t think they would say yes, which is another reason I was like, “We don’t have to discuss this as a full band because I’m sending them a shitty dark YouTube video of us with a note to fast forward to 34 minutes.” I didn’t think they were going to watch this fucking YouTube video for real, but then they did, and they wanted us to play.
We got the email at band practice, which was awesome, but also some surprising news for Ray.
Lily: I remember thinking, “Oh, I forgot about that.” It was super exciting because that is Oliver’s favorite band, and Conor is our Mother Mary as a household. Plus, for me and Molly, Cat’s Cradle is a place of lore. We’re very excited to play there.
We got that email during band practice, but a week later, there was a hurricane. There was definitely a period where we were like, “We don’t know if we’re going to play this show. Everything is upside down, and we just can’t think about it right now.”
Then, some days passed, and we returned to it and discussed whether we could even do it now. The answer was yes. There was also the question, “Is this worth doing right now?” That was more questionable, but it landed at “Yes, it’s worth it to be a band, even during disaster times when people are like surviving.”
This can be part of a balanced community where some heavy mutual aid and community care stuff is going on, but there’s still a place for music within that. It was good to talk about and reaffirm that. Foxing made us do it.
Of course, I contacted y’all to schedule this interview the morning the storm hit.
Oliver: Yeah, you did. [laughs]
Within an hour of sending it, I was like, “Oh, no. Can I undo that?” I would check my email like every other day, just hoping y’all were doing okay.
We had friends out doing cleanup efforts and we have heard some horrible things, from the lack of EpiPens for yellow jacket hordes to chemicals in the water eating through work boots.
Oliver: It was a wild time. I carried that around for a few days before I was like, “We just got this crazy email that someone wants to interview us,” because I didn’t have power or running water.
Lily: We had this running joke at the beginning of all this where there was no cell service except for a couple of places in town. There will just be crowds of people trying desperately to make a phone call at a fire station or whatever. And if we showed up at one of those satellite stations being like, “Yeah, so my musical influence is…,” then that would be fucked. [laughs]
Obviously, I can’t speak to your day-to-day experiences navigating the fallout from this. Have you seen it mainly as a positive community response? Are there grifters or vultures trying to make a quick buck or take advantage of the situation?
Outside of our national media, of course.
Ray: We’re already out of the news cycle, but things are still so fucked here. Most people have water now, but the water is still coming out brownish and has sediment. The city says, “You can use it to shower, but make sure you don’t get it in your eyes, ears, mouth, nose, or open wounds.” At that point, some people are just not going to shower.
I only got power back in the past week and a half. My landlord has threatened eviction because we haven’t paid the entire month’s rent, but my house has been uninhabitable without these critical amenities. I don’t have a job anymore because I used to work in events and catering, and those aren’t happening right now. I applied for disaster unemployment the week the storm hit, but I haven’t gotten any money I was told I would get.
And yet, I’m lucky. I’m one of the luckiest fucking people in this whole region. We all are, in a sense.
Lily and Oliver have been going to this farm in a more rural area where they had worked for years before I met them. I’ve gone a few times to help clean up the farm from the flooding because they lost everything. And they consider themselves lucky they’re not in Asheville. They’ve told me a couple of times, “Damn, I’m glad I’m not there. At least we have well water and a spring nearby.”
I really hope folks don’t forget about Western North Carolina, especially in the eastern part of the state. There’s always that Eastern vs. Western NC rivalry, but we’re the same state.
Fortunately, the community response has been amazing. From mutual aid to all these different organizations raising a fuck ton of money, distributing resources, and helping with cleanup in these towns that have been destroyed. Sunny Point Cafe in West Asheville was offering 2-3 free meals for people every day.
Oliver: They used to get a line daily when tourists were here.
Ray: Now that the water is back, it feels like when people decided that they didn’t care about COVID anymore. Everyone was just partying in the streets. All the bars and restaurants in West Asheville and downtown have been popping.
This time last week, I could’ve gone up and down the main street in West Asheville and gotten five free meals. The unhoused population is huge here, so obviously, that was an incredible resource for more than just me. But now, it’s all stopped, and there’s this attempt at going back to normal when everything is still fucked.
Lily: We’re in this strange, awkward moment where some people are still in dire straits without a house or food to eat, and others have moved on. It’s this half-and-half thing that is deeply uncomfortable.
Oliver: I feel like the good stuff is really good, and the places that have been caring for the community still are. There are organizations like Pansy Collective that raised a bunch of money. They have been by and for the community, led by people who live here and give a shit since the collective was founded. That is awesome and continues to be an actual resource to the community.
But the comparison to the early pandemic rings true for the rest of it, where it’s not novel anymore, and everyone just wants to return to normal.
I think it’s telling how people are acting about this. It is sad, and it’s also amazing. Not that there was a climate disaster, but the way that the community has come together in the ways that it has. As tensions rise and the collective culture shifts here, it will be interesting to see what unfolds and where people stand on “Do we care about this or not?” now that it’s not the only thing going on.
Molly: I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the number of people offering support in residential neighborhoods. For the past few weeks, it’s become common to see one or two folding tables with free stuff on every block. When people got their power back, there were houses with huge extension cords running out for battery charging stations that people could use.
I’ve been disappointed by the government and their response, not surprised by it. But I’ve been more surprised by the sheer number of individual efforts. Like, we’ve gotten so much baby formula into Asheville in the past two weeks. It’s nice to see how many people are eager to help and sending everything that they have out for other people who do.
Lily: This whole experience has been a testament to what having a really good network of mutual aid in a community will do. There were organizations that existed here and have existed for years that were ready to jump into action. Not every single person in Asheville is embedded in a mutual aid network, but everyone was benefiting from mutual aid in some way, shape or form.
I also cannot stress enough that the free food or packs of water bottles we’ve been getting was most likely given by a person, not any sort of nonprofit or government organization. It was just people helping each other out and it got really contagious. Everyone was receiving help, so they became more willing to give help. People were trusting each other and having good faith in one another.
I can count on one hand the number of showers I’ve gotten to take in all of this, but they have mostly been at strangers’ homes where they let me in to shower. It’s bizarre. I don’t know them, they don’t know me, but here I am having the best shower of my life in their house because they happen to be on well water and we have a mutual friend.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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