The OaKs have been known in
How are you preparing for SXSW? Have you ever been to a festival like
this before?
Matthew Antolick: The closet thing we’ve been
to is CMJ. That was the biggest festival before this one. From what we gather
this one’s going to be like ten times bigger or something, there’s just a lot
of activity around it. We’re making a lot of preparation here… instead of
playing one show we’re playing every day, and there’s a lot more bands there.
So, yeah, there’s a lot to take in and prepare for.
Bring me through the process of prepping for this.
Ryan Costello: We’ve put together like a
basic 30-minute set of what we feel is our best live material. And we’ve put it
together in a way that flows, and it’s only five songs… some of the songs are
kind of long. Like the feature song of the set is “Masood,” which is our lead
single. So we’ve just been kind of honing the 30-minute set for the past couple
months.
MA: With the prospect of going
out to
Are there any bands that you’re looking forward to seeing?
RC: We’re not seeing many shows,
because now we’re playing every day. So that’s kind of what I’m focusing on.
MA: Ryan’s the pragmatist, I’m
the idealist, so I guess the way I’m coming from it there’s a lot of bands I’d
like to see… and I probably won’t end up doing it. You know what I mean? Like,
we are playing every day and there’s a couple of bands playing at the exact
same time we are on Wednesday night that I would’ve loved to have gone and
seen. The Russian Futurists and So Percussion, and couple other of cool
instrumental groups are playing, but it’s right at the same time as us, so I’m
like, you know, crap.
What are you hoping to take away from this?
RC: I think our main goal is to
take away a booking agent and/or a label.
MA: It would be really, really
great to get a couple of things going on. It’s really important for us to find
the right person that has their heart in the same place as us and kind of gets
where we’re coming from. Now we’re at the point where everything is almost too
much for us to handle it all and it’d be really nice to have a team of people who
are also kind of like-minded to us that are doing the booking and the label
relations and all that stuff that we’re having to do on our own right now.
Is it important to get the humanitarian message in your music clearly
communicated to this new audience?
RC: No… we’ve evolved as a band,
and it’s become really more of the backstory of the band as opposed to the
thrust of it. I mean, if they’re gonna respond it’s gonna be when they get
wrapped up in the music and they say, like “Wow, I haven’t seen a show like
that in a while,” or never seen a show like that. I think that’s our main goal.
We expect that people get to know us, get to know our music and really get into
our sound, and then the back story unfolds itself and becomes a part of
experiencing our band.
MA: And the reason is not that
we’ve moved away from the things that are concerns, I mean there are definitely
still concerns. But the difference is when we came out as a band we were like,
“This is what we want to communicate” and we’d get right up on stage and spend
time communicating it, and we’d just kind of lose people. As we evolved as a
band we realized it’s much more effective to let these things get discovered,
and music can speak volumes in its place. And we’re hoping that is going to motivate
them to come online and check out our backstory, and all that stuff is just
there. And I think that, in a humanitarian angle, can be more effective than
trying to bring it out in the open, like spoon feeding the audience. You know,
people like discovering things.
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