Biography

Though the band claimed Columbia, South Carolina, as home, Aaron Graves started Those Lavender Whales in his dorm room at Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee, in the early 2000s. His first EPs featured warm and often humorous songs marked by Graves's humanity and humility. They bore the imprint of Fork and Spoon Records, the label he would officially co-found in 2010. Many of Graves’s earliest recordings are compiled on 2007’s Let’s Be Friends! I’m Sorry I’m So Sleepy! and the 2010 collection Pilgrims, Friends, and Blood-Ties. Across Those Lavender Whales’ records, Graves’s songwriting broadened but never lost its homespun charm and hallmark bigheartedness. The band’s first proper full-length, 2012’s Tomahawk of Praise, ping-pongs between intimate musings about the uncertainty of growing up and starting a family, encomiums to togetherness and compassion, and joyous celebrations of community. The specter of Graves’s 2014 cancer diagnosis—the disease would kill him in 2019—hangs over the band’s second and final full-length, My Bones Are Singing. Graves’s optimistic outlook is challenged by dire circumstances, yet he remains resolute in the belief that goodness and friendship always win in the end. As Graves and his records grew, so, too, did Those Lavender Whales—not only into a band, but a full-fledged family, with Graves’s wife, Jessica Bornick, and longtime friends Chris Gardner and Patrick Wall joining Graves on Tomahawk of Praise and for live performances.