Meet the folk-rock duo that's playing in Gastonia

A psychedelic folk-rock band whose mandolin player recently broke a world record will perform Friday at The Rooster in Gastonia.

Brothers Andrew and Stephen Oliver formed Brother Oliver in 2013, and in 2022, Stephen Oliver broke a world record by playing the mandolin for 27 hours straight. The duo also made a movie, "How to Break a World Record," that can be viewed on Apple TV or Amazon Prime.

Stephen Oliver said in an interview that he started in music as a child when he took private saxophone lessons.

"And then when it came to playing more original music, Andrew and I just, you know, he got a guitar. I got a ukulele, actually, and we used to just have fun with our friends, just hanging out playing music," Oliver said. "Started with cover, started making originals, and then eventually I just randomly bought a mandolin and just kind of started playing that and never stopped."

The brothers are originally from Greenville, Michigan, but they now live in Greenville, South Carolina. They founded Brother Oliver after moving to South Carolina.

"So we had, like early on, a friend in Michigan. We had a group. It was just basically just for fun ... And then when Andrew and I moved to South Carolina, our friend stayed in Michigan, and so we started new, and we named ourselves Brother Oliver," Oliver said.

Their most recent album was "Well, Hell," which they released in 2019. It has a "psychedelic rock vibe," Stephen Oliver said. Since then, the brothers have released individual songs, but their biggest project to date has been the movie they made. Their original plan was to make a YouTube skit in which Stephen Oliver would pretend to try to break a world record but would ultimately fail. As they researched what it took to break that world record, their plan changed.

"What really happened, Dan Johnson, he's a good friend of ours, and he's a producer and filmmaker for the movie, 'How to break a world record,'" Oliver said. "And he and my brother actually had come up with a skit we would do for our YouTube channel, where we would pretend to break a world record."

The record they were considering pretending to break was the world record for the longest playing mandolin record - that record, before Oliver broke it, was 26 hours and 42 minutes.

"And while we were planning to do the YouTube video, we started looking at the actual record, and kind of got an idea of what the rules were, what the current record was. And I was like, 'man, I think I can actually break this record,'" Oliver said. "And I think it's like an opportunity just for, like, a personal accomplishment, something that I've always kind of wanted to do, and something that would be cool for the band and brand as a whole."

They "flipped the script," and on Dec. 17, 2022, they went to Swanson's Warehouse, an event venue in Greenville, where Stephen made his attempt.

"So there's a lot of rules and guidelines provided by Guinness, so we really had strictly follow those rules in order to legitimately break the record and have it recognized by Guinness," Oliver said. "Playing the mandolin for that long, like I said, I thought it would be a little easier, but it was honestly pretty terrible."

Ultimately, Oliver played for 27 hours, 8 minutes and 33 seconds.

"Going into it, I thought staying awake would probably be the hardest part, and that was the least of my concerns during the attempt," he said. "It was mostly my fingertips, making sure I don't break any rules accidentally, and just the mental gymnastics it took to, you know, force myself to keep playing, because it gets pretty boring and monotonous for a while. If you stop, you can make it all go away, but if you stop, you also don't get a world record. I had to press on."

He said that breaking the record was especially hard on his fingertips.

"They never bled, but they got so soft that, at times, it was hard for my fingers to even hold down the strings, because my fingers were almost like a gelatinous consistency, because they were just absolutely destroyed," Oliver said. "So by the end, like, I don't know if this is like, factual, but like it felt like I was basically, like, skin to bone. There was like no more fingertip left. It took probably a month and a half for my fingertips to really heal back up back to normal."

Making the movie added another layer of complexity to an already difficult task.

"The movie doesn't just cover during the attempt, it covered the before, the lead up, during, the after," he said. "But while it did make things a lot difficult, in a lot of ways, it … helped push me personally, because with how difficult breaking the record was, the fact that there was a movie being filmed was a huge motivating factor for me."

"In my mind, the movie wouldn't have been even half as good if I didn't break the record," he added.

Tickets for the show are $10 in advance and $15 at the door. For more information, look up The Rooster on Facebook.