With plenty of experience under his belt, BiFi’s Organ Donor has sculpted a sound that is justly reminiscent of Radiohead and the Smiths, but with its own natural flavor attached.

Organ Donor is the brainchild of Jeremy Grace, who is also the main performer and sole writer for the band. The idea came to him in 1994 when he glanced in his wallet and became inspired.

“I was looking at my driver’s license — permit actually — and the words stuck out, like a good band name,” Grace says.

Music was something that ran hand in hand with Grace. As a young child, he wrote a simple piano piece called “Penguin Waltz” that the artist states is “unreleased” at this point.

“My dad was very musical, so it seemed like a natural thing to do for me,” Grace says.

Later on, Grace was part of many local bands, including Badger Haus, *Aphgun*, and Everyone Loves Delaware, all while keeping Organ Donor on the back burner.

While there are the aforementioned sound-alikes with Organ Donor’s music, there are plenty of different realms from which Grace pulls his songs.

Along with that, other things inspire Grace, like the lone guitar that sits around at the Bi-Fi Studio.

“I’ve written some of my best songs on that guitar. If Aaron [Hefley, of Bi-Fi records] ever sold that, I’d probably buy it from him,” Grace says.

The spiritual side that can be found in Grace can often heard through his music as well.

“I think that of all the big questions in life, the biggest one is this: Is there a God, and what could he possibly want from me?” Grace says. “I believe the answer to the first question is ‘yes,’ because if there was no God, no bigger scheme of things, life would be a total waste and it might as well be over right now. As for the second question, that’s one I wrestle with constantly.”

There is also the influence of being a musician in the Midwestern setting. Many musicians here are influenced by the amalgamation of styles swirling around here.

“There’s a tremendous history to Midwestern music; roots in folk, blues, and punk all run very deep in the Midwest,” Grace says.

Many of those elements can be heard in the new disc coming out on Bi-Fi Records, titled “Midwest/Italia.”

The new album is mainly centered around the idea of distance, embodied by the concept of the distance between the places in its title.

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