Since their first performance at Anti*Pop in 2006, The OaKs have earned an enthusiastic following due as much in part to their cunningly complex music arrangements as to their epic, humanitarian-based back story.

The band has since grown from the folksy strumming and passionate vocals of Ryan Costello and the versatile percussion of Matthew Antolick to include four more members adding back vocals and horns. Metromix had lunch with Costello and Antolick and talked about their history, the superiority of home-based recording to studios, and why being open about where their music comes from works for them.

• The OaKs will open for the Blue Man Group at the Florida Music Festival at Wall Street Plaza on May 15 at 9:30 p.m.
  

Give me a brief history of The OaKs.
Ryan Costello: The history would start back when Matt and I met. I guess it would be in Tampa, we were both going to University of South Florida. Matt was a grad student teaching philosophy, I was a biology student. We met through Matt’s wife who worked at the apartment complex where we both stayed and the first night we met we started making music together.

Matthew Antolick: It was right about the time, back when, what, late ‘90s, when people really started catching on to home-based recording. So we actually got our first little program and Ryan would come over and record stuff, and we started kind of multi-layering things, just the two of us.

RC: I guess it was 2001 when it started looking like I was going to head to Afghanistan. Late 2001, it was after 9/11. And then into 2002 I started fulltime getting ready to go to Afghanistan, saving up my money, and spending all my time and energy figuring out how to get there. And then February 2003 I went to Afghanistan for a visit, November 2003 I moved to Afghanistan, so that was it for our music for that time. I continued to write in Afghanistan, but I wrote a lot more folk-based stuff. But I always thought “If I do end up going back to America and joining back with Matt then I just really want to be able to bring something rhythmically that would challenge him.” Afghan music is really funky, like I don’t even know what their time signatures would be.

MA: Like funky-weird, not funky-funky.

On your website you mention the humanitarian mission to Afghanistan, how half your CD profits are going to a fund for Afghan widows and refugees, and that you do social work. You’re not trying to make people feel guilty are you?
RC: That’s the funny thing. It’s hard to explain. This is just what we do naturally. For me I do social work because I feel like that was my calling, it’s what I’m meant to do. For our first show I really started talking a lot about what I did in Afghanistan and the social work…

MA: It was like play a song then talk for five minutes, and then a slideshow [laughs].

RC: When we first started the band our original intent was to bring some sort of social consciousness to the music world, and to challenge people. But in a positive way and never with guilt. We don’t necessarily want to challenge them in this sort of starry-eyed, liberal masters-degree kid kind of way. You know, that “All people in other countries are beautiful” and…

MA: …and “We’re all making a difference because we’re singing about it.” Creating awareness is always a positive thing. Going back to your question, it’s not really about that at all, it’s more like you read these biographies about artists that are like “Well why do you make your art?” “Well I don’t know I’m just drawn to it.” And it’s kind of like, we’ve always been that way with humanitarian causes the same way we’ve been with music. We can’t help but make music, and we can’t help but be concerned about this stuff.

In your next album you took a lot of care in arranging the music for each song rather than using modern mixing techniques, basically making the recording more challenging for you. What was the rationale behind that?
MA: Ryan and I have heard way too many albums where the song writing ideas are amazing, the songs themselves are great, and then they just get killed by over-production.

RC: What was harder about it was having to envision what you wanted the track to sound like before the mixing process. So because we had to know what how big the kick drum should sound, how the snare should sound, where we should place the microphones and things like that. And once you know that then you can experiment and get it and listen back and ask “is that it?” So you try it until you get it.

A lot of bands are very secretive about where their music comes from and how it’s made, but you guys are very open about it. Why?
MA: I like getting into conversations with other musicians, like “Hey I discovered this in the studio” or “I play this part this way” and when everybody shares their information it just leads to… more fun.

RC: I think some bands try to convey what I think is a false sense of mystery to their music. That there’s something deeper than there actually is. I think with us, we have so many things that we want to communicate that we want to be open with them. We want people to be able to connect with our music, but relationally. And connect with us. We just want to be straightforward about it.

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