‘Eyes on the doughnut, not on the hole.’ Columbia bandmates reunite to honor late musician

Some time back, Chris Gardner was sorting through a box of memorabilia from his band, Those Lavender Whales. The band at one time was a core member of the Columbia-area underground music scene, and its founder, Aaron Graves, was an anchor of that community.

Gardner pulled out a card with his dear friend Graves’ handwriting scrawled on it, a quote that Gardner would later search on the internet and find to be known as the “Optimist’s Creed,” once printed on boxes of Mayflower Donuts:

“As you ramble on through life, brother, whatever be your goal, keep your eye upon the doughnut, and not upon the hole.”

Graves was a doughnut kind of guy — literally, he loved doughnuts. And he loved people and bringing people together and celebrating the sweetness of friendships, all throughout his short three decades of life.

So it is fitting that the surviving members of Graves’ Those Lavender Whales will reunite on stage for the first time since his death to play a show in his honor on, oh yes, National Doughnut Day.

It will be a bittersweet night, Graves’ bandmates know, as they remember the musical and personal legacy of a man who poured himself into his community. But they’re going to focus on the sweet — the doughnut, if you will.

“The most important thing about all of this is just honoring Aaron and who he was and the spirit he brings to the community and his openness and loving personality,” said Jessica Bornick, Graves’ wife of 10 years and the drummer for Those Lavender Whales, a band whose genre proudly eludes definition but falls somewhere in the indie-folk-rock spectrum. Graves preferred to call it “friendship folk.”

Bornick and Gardner, along with Patrick Wall and Jordan Blackmon, are playing together at New Brookland Tavern in West Columbia Friday night as Those Lavender Whales in celebration of the life and music of Graves, who died in 2019.

Graves, a Columbia native, was diagnosed with a brain tumor in 2014. He was 28 years old with a wife, a daughter, a band that was touring off of its first full-length album, “Tomahawk of Praise,” and a burgeoning record label, Fork & Spoon Records, in the midst of producing a slew of local musicians’ albums.

Graves had long centered his music around the sense of community that was, in many ways, central to his identity. Fork & Spoon, which Graves cofounded with Gardner and Blackmon, was born out of his childhood bedroom as a collective of Columbia musicians who helped record, produce and promote one another’s art. (The record label’s quirky name was inspired by Graves’ grandmother’s wall decorations: a large fork and spoon.)

“I’ve always believed in community, and especially in the Columbia community,” Graves told The State in 2014. “Growing up here, I always felt very included and very loved here, and I’ve always wanted people to feel that way.”

After Graves’ diagnosis, his community turned all that love back on him, raising thousands of dollars to support his medical expenses as he underwent treatment at Duke University.

“Just to feel that (love) coming back to us just kind of makes me feel like, ‘Oh yeah, it worked! I was believing in the right thing,’” Graves said at the time.

Throughout his cancer treatment, Graves and Bornick would host regular potluck dinners for the expansive Fork & Spoon community in their home, as they had for years before. It was part of Graves’ natural way of bringing people together.

Friday night’s show at New Brookland will kick off with a potluck meal.

“It feels like we’re making an Aaron party,” said Blackmon, a songwriter and producer who played for years as a guitarist for Toro y Moi. “This is an event where Aaron’s all over it.”

Graves died June 5, 2019, at the age of 33 after the cancer made a sudden, unbeatable resurgence. He and Bornick had just welcomed their second child, a son, Julien, and Those Lavender Whales had recently finished a final tour after producing another album, “My Bones Are Singing.”

Those Lavender Whales played their final full-band show at Columbia’s Art Bar in November 2018, about seven months before Graves died.

“We just had an awesome show, and it was so much fun,” Bornick remembered. “Looking back, it was so special to have that show, and that one felt really good.”

“They were good times. It’s hard not to look back fondly on them,” Wall said.

Though they’ve now had years to grieve and process the loss of Graves, the surviving members of Those Lavender Whales never exactly had closure on the band itself.

“It’s hard to think of things in the past tense,” said Wall, who now lives in Phoenix working as an in-house editor at a musical instrument museum. “Having the opportunity to come back and play these songs, for me, is a huge thing. It’s another way to keep that connection alive, in some ways. I still listen to these songs. I still think about the shows we played, playing in weird basements in Baltimore and then going to play a club in Brooklyn and then taking a 12-hour drive to Philadelphia.”

Wall, Bornick, Blackmon and Gardner all will play as the backing members of Those Lavender Whales, while a rotating cast of guest artists will fill Graves’ vocal role on various songs. Graves’ and Bornick’s daughter, Elvie, now 13, will play, too; Gardner has been giving her piano lessons for years.

Friday’s show also will honor the 10th anniversary of “Tomahawk of Praise,” which has been re-pressed on cloud-colored 180-gram vinyl and will be available for purchase at the show as well as online at forkandspoonrecords.net and locally at Papa Jazz Record Shoppe in Five Points.

“Aaron’s just felt so present in every aspect of planning this,” Bornick said. “I guess I don’t see the show so much as closure for me but as another way to celebrate him.”