Back in November 2019, Orion Simprini of kaleidoscopic glam-pop band The Orion Experience noticed something unusual when he checked his monthly deposits from CD Baby. “I was like, ‘What's going on here? Something is happening…’” he recalls. “And then I realized that it was TikTok. I went on TikTok and there were thousands of fans -- mind you, not even using the official Orion Experience audio. Somebody had made a clip off of their computer speakers of ‘The Cult of Dionysus’ -- and that had gone viral. That shows you how much I had nothing to do with this.”

Since then, The Orion Experience have racked up more than 117 million streams and 6 million listeners on Spotify, 68 million views on TikTok, and 75 thousand subscribers and 32 million views on YouTube – with 9.6 million views alone for “The Cult of Dionysus,” the song that organically attracted a devoted fanbase of gamers, furries, cosplayers, and queer kids. But it took Simprini three decades of hustling to become an “overnight sensation” -- with a song that was actually written in 1996 and recorded in 2006, by a band that had been dormant since 2013. “It's been a long journey,” he marvels. “It's crazy.”

Simprini has been going viral, in a way, since 1993, when his first band, New Jersey powerpop outfit Kitty in the Tree, caught the attention of MTV and WHTG’s Matt Pinfield. “We had sent out our demo tapes, and we’d put them in little packages that looked like presents, with wrapping paper and all kinds of toys, just to get somebody's attention,” Simprini recalls. “Matt was at our very first show -- I remember it well, at the Melody Bar Tavern in New Brunswick. We had a song called ‘Maybe We'll Get Somewhere,’ and he spun it on his local program. You could call it ‘going viral’ for the first time, because kids started coming to our concerts in handmade T-shirts.”

Kitty in the Tree made it to a certain level, playing on bills with Ween, the White Stripes, the Strokes, Cake, and Letters to Cleo, but they couldn’t land a record deal, because they were so out of step with musical trends at the time. “My idols were always Bowie and Bolan -- I mean, how could you see a person like that and not think, ‘That's a rock star’? Because that's what it is. It's dangerous. But in the ‘90s, that was not cool,” says Simprini. “In ‘99, we were just grinding and grinding, putting out great music -- and the new popular music was Puddle of Mudd. And I just wanted to cry; people who get onstage in a baseball cap and a fucking T-shirt drive me nuts. But back then, it was like, you had to be either the Backstreet Boys or Puddle of Mudd -- and if you weren’t, good luck getting a deal in the next 10 years. The timing was never right.”

The disappointment eventually wore Simprini down. “Because I was in that mindset of having to please the gatekeepers, I never felt good enough. And by that time, in 2002, I was made aware by many friends that I was an alcoholic,” he says. “But I got into recovery and got sober, and then I broke up Kitty in the Tree after that.” A year later, he started The Orion Experience and had another viral moment, when Perez Hilton blogged about their song “Obsessed With You” in 2008. “I had nothing to do with that either -- it was through fans that had submitted it,” Simprini chuckles. “And it's the same thing with TikTok. No matter how hard I try, nothing that I have ever done on purpose has gotten me any kind of breaks like that. That’s the only thing that I can say about that kind of any success that I've ever had.”

Still, the world wasn’t quite ready for The Orion Experience, who were “obsessed with 1970s Top of the Pops,” ELO, the Sweet, and all things glitter. “We were just known as this bubbly, high-energy sort of pop band, and no one really took us all that seriously,” says Simprini. “We would always perform in glamorous costumes and sparkly make-up because we embraced the gender-fluid aesthetic of our Glam Rock heroes Bowie, Bolan, and Cher. You had some bands – Scissor Sisters, perhaps -- that were doing it, but in the indie-rock scene of 2008 it was rare. I'm polyamorous. I love many people and I always have. I just wanted to kiss beautiful boys and beautiful girls, and I still do; to me that's the spice of life, and I don't understand where the confusion is about it. But at that time, identifying as the bisexual, pan, polyamorous kind of person that I was, it was like, “You're just a freak.’”

The band soldiered on until 2013, but when their Off-Broadway production The Orion Experience Presents:Children of the Stars, An intergalactic Rock Odyssey failed to take off, they went on an indefinite hiatus. “We had all made a pact that if that didn't get us through the glass ceiling, then the time was not right,” Simprini explains. “We didn't break up the band or anything, but we decided we should just pursue other things.”

Fast-forward, then, to 2019, when “The Cult of Dionysus” – a song that, ironically, had been a last-minute “throwaway track” on The Orion Experience’s first independent release, Cosmicandy -- took off unexpectedly. Simprini called up his Orion Experience bandmate Linda Horwatt, whom he’d first met in 1992 when they were both attending Rider University on full theater scholarships, and said, ‘Something's going on here. Do you want to bring The Orion Experience back?’” And they went to work building an online presence for the band -- which took a minute. “I had to search an old hard drive to find the password to our Instagram account,” he chuckles. “I hadn't been on it in seven years!”

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit just as the revived Orion Experience were starting to plan live shows, Simprini kept up the momentum by turning his home studio into a live-streaming space, performing online concerts that “kind of had a Sid & Marty Krofft vibe to them. And we started to build a community.” They’ve since started gigging live again – a sold-out 2022 show at the Sunset Strip’s famed Roxy was a major event among TOE fans – and have shifted back to creating new music. “So much my life was spent trying to produce music for A&R reps that would hopefully give me a career, and then all of a sudden I have a fanbase and they want music, so I've gotta make it,” says Simprini, who’s back to grinding. “There's a part of me sometimes that wonders what would happen if I did nothing and let things ‘go viral’ again. I wonder if I would actually be more successful, because the actual people who like the music would just do the work for me! But I'm not willing to take that risk.”

And so, now it’s full steam ahead for The Orion Experience, who released the album Fever Dream in 2021 and have a new covers LP of half legacy and half contemporary artists set for 2023, featuring songs by Kate Bush, David Bowie, T. Rex, Styx, Mother Mother, Cavetown, Studio Killers, and My Chemical Romance. Simprini is also working on a solo record called Tragic Magic (“It’s kind of like my Fleetwood Mac witchcraft record, where like everything is spooky and ghost-y”) and looking ahead to the Orion Experience’s next album of originals, which he says will be “based on Greek mythology.”

In the meantime, The Orion Experience have reissued CD, cassette, and various colored and picture-disc vinyl editions of Cosmicandy and Children of the Stars, and in 2023, Simprini is even releasing a compilation of remastered, previously unheard Kitty in the Tree demos, The Lost Years – a true full-circle development in his career. “Kitty in the Tree had about 10 years of content recorded, but because the name of the game was ‘get a record label or else no one's ever gonna hear your stuff,’ we never pressed any vinyl or anything like that. We would just duplicate cassettes in our living room and pass them out to whoever would listen. And so a lot of that material is all in a shoebox; I’ve already started pulling them off of the cassette tapes.”

So, all this begs the question: Why is the time finally right now for Simprini, who for the first time in his life is making his living as a full-time musician?

“It’s because the gatekeepers collapsed,” Simprini says. “I came up in the time when you were ‘done’ by 25, and that was ingrained in me for a long time. And also body acceptance, too – everybody back then was fucking rail-thin, but now people are like, ‘Who gives a fuck?’ It's great to see that. I think this younger generation of queer people is more along the lines of where I was in the late ‘90s. When I was coming up in New York in the ‘90s and 2000s, if you were a gay man, you looked a certain way: You had muscles, you had short hair, you went to the Limelight and you took your shirt off and you danced. Everyone looked exactly the same. But I was always like, ‘I wear makeup because I think I look awesome in it. I just do it because it makes me feel good.’

“The message of The Orion Experience -- which makes sense now -- is basically love who you want, do what you want, dress how you want, fuck who you want,” Simprini sums up. “Let's all  go crazy. It's just that simple.”