The Oaks first appeared on the scene in 2006 promising to donate 50% of their debut album Our Father’s sales to the Global Hope Network. In a world where rich rock stars fly to fund-raising gigs on private jets, it was a remarkable display of charity. It wasn’t the first from singer/songwriter Ryan Costello, who had just returned from two years humanitarian work in Afghanistan, an experience that was stamped all over the record.

On his return Costello was reunited with long-time friend Matt Antolick and the duo resurrected their band The Oaks. Two years on, Antolick and Costello return with a full array of musicians and a set of songs of such high quality that it surely dispels any thoughts that they nothing more than a fund-raising act. Chatting to WB, the band’s two main men mulled over their new album Songs for Waiting.


The sophomore slump is something that can often be dismissed as myth, yet continues to repeat itself. Was your preparation writing and recording of your second album drastically different?

MATT: Yes and no. It was different in the sense that the first album was just Ryan and I learning how to record. The first time we got together it was five hours of figuring out how to get the mixer to work with Cubase. We multilayered all the songs, and wrote as we recorded. Then one day we got the call to play live, and we hustled to put together a live group that could realize our compositions on stage.

With Songs for Waiting, there were six of us. We'd been playing together for a while, and the songs, although initial skeletons were written by Ryan and I, were fleshed out by six people rather than two.

But as far as the approach is concerned, it's the same: we didn't set out to ‘make a better album’ or anything like that. We just sat down to write like we always do. Writing, for us, has always been about getting quiet, setting up the drums and guitar, and just opening a space where we can really listen to what's coming out of the instruments. But of course, writing is a skill like anything else: the more you just do it, the better you get at it.

The new album is titled Songs for Waiting. Where did the title come from?

MATT: Ryan had written an instrumental with the title Song for Waiting early in 2007 that we both felt would definitely end up on the album. I really liked the idea of using its plural form for the album name as a kind of concept that would encompass all the ideas we were exploring, without being some sort of canned message or fixed metaphor. I liked the idea that "waiting" not only embraces everything on the record, but that in a sense, everything we do in life can be classified as waiting: Waiting for the bus, waiting for a baby to be born, waiting for death, waiting for love, waiting for rebirth, etc. I also like that it's open to interpretation - a title that will mean different things to different people, just like the songs themselves. We want to give the listener a chance to interact with the record, rather than putting something out that's just automatically accessible because it's all given on the surface.

Ryan of course spent two years doing humanitarian work in Afghanistan, experiences that were stamped all over your debut album in particular. Can you differentiate your experiences there from your music, or do they very much go hand-in-hand?
 
RYAN: In trying to be an honest musician, I find myself drawing on my time in Afghanistan without even thinking much about it. At the same time, especially with this new album, I tried to approach writing in a way that was able to resonate universally, that more people could connect personally with. I also pull a lot from the difficulties I faced in Afghanistan as well – being pushed physically, when I was sick a lot or emotionally, in navigating across the wide gulf of cultures, or in other ways.

Your humanitarian work certainly put the group on the map. Any updates on how things are with the people you worked with?

RYAN: I’ve actually heard recently that they’re doing really well, especially the families I taught agriculture to in our Hope Center for Agriculture and Nutrition Development. Many of the families that were trained have trained others who are now training others, so the multiplication is having a much bigger impact than I could have hoped for. A former co-worker at Global Hope Network just came back from there and he told me that he traveled by car 18 hours from Kabul, and then by horse a full day out into the mountains, and found a farmer growing vegetables in an underground greenhouse which was one of the agricultural techniques I taught. You can’t beat that.

In a way do you think arriving with such an interesting story hurt the band’s credibility? Or do you feel you may not have been granted the same opportunities without such a hook?

MATT: Things like this are always a blessing and a curse. It's a blessing because in the beginning we thought that it was a good idea to bring it out into the open, and it was. People took notice. The original idea was to show a different possibility for doing something good with music. Not only that, we wrote Our Fathers at a time when the despair over the state of the music business was really starting to heat up. We thought: ‘Well, we could jump in the rat race and scramble after the same labels everyone else is, in the same way, only to end up giving half our profits to a label...or...we could embrace the indie revolution and do it ourselves, but do it in a way that benefits people that really need it.’

The fact of the matter is: music promotion is usually all about self promotion. It's about ‘hey look, I'm cool ‘cause I'm doing something artistic and original.’ But everyone is doing the same thing, so is it? The appeal of giving half the profits from the sale of Our Fathers to Afghan widows and refugees is that every time we promote ourselves, we promote someone in need. The usual approach is to self-promote for years, make it big, and then give back. We thought ‘the rules are all different, now. Why not do that from the start?’

So that's the blessing. But the curse is exactly what you said. There is the side of us that wants people to appreciate the music not just for the message. Coming out in this way made things happen very quickly, and yet, we sometimes find ourselves wishing people would dig beneath the Afghan angle and try to find out what else is going on underneath.

RYAN: I understand to a certain extent why it’s clouded us so much as artists, because it’s such a unique back-story. But for me I really feel accomplished when someone comes up to me after a show and says, ‘Wow – that was powerful’, just the music, by itself. I don’t think of myself on stage or in the studio as a humanitarian, just as an artist trying to find real expression.

Has music always been a passion for you? When did you start believing you could do it for a living?

MATT: Actually, yes. I was just always into it. I used to steal my brother's drumsticks, set up pillows on the floor, and play along to MTV videos. Back when they played videos.

RYAN: For me I feel like I always need some kind of intense artistic expression – in Afghanistan, it was mainly photography. In college I wrote copious amounts of poetry and played with video production, and then later on got involved with Matt and formed Figure Vs Ground, our first band. For the past couple of years it’s been The Oaks. If I don’t have that outlet in some kind of media then I start to feel anemic and claustrophobic. As far as making a living as a musician – I still don’t really know if that’s possible for me or not, we’ll have to see what the future holds on that. That’s not my main concern, as long as I can create.

Sonically Songs for Waiting is denser than its predecessor. Tell us about your approach to the recording of the new album.

MATT: We took a sort of ‘old school approach to the album’ in that we avoided pushing the final mastering to make it loud - like some big obnoxious billboard with bright colors that you just can't help but notice. That's good for marketing to a particular demographic - specifically one with short attention spans - but not so good when you're trying to take the listener back to the old days when listening to a record was an experience like reading a book or watching a good film - not just a way to sell songs.

Fortunately, a lot of writers have understood where we were coming from with Songs for Waiting, and as a band, and that's always encouraging. I think we're naturally in a vulnerable position especially with reviewers sometimes. I know most writers have a mountain of material to get through, and I think that the album, given it's nature, sometimes gets misunderstood as not as much of an attention getter - again, not immediately accessible - when put up against other, louder, more hooky records.

You also recruited more musicians for Songs for Waiting. Has performing live been somewhat of a challenge?
 
MATT: Only in the sense of the space required to house us and our truckload of instruments! But we've gotten really good at adapting our setup to any room. At SXSW our stage was 10 feet wide, so two of us set up on the floor, and we made it work. So there may have been challenges in the beginning, but now I just enjoy it so much. Playing live is my favorite part of the Oaks - apart from writing new songs and going on the journey of putting a new seed idea out there and seeing where it ends up....it's always different than you'd expect.

RYAN: At first it was definitely difficult. After our debut album, when we came together into the 6-member band we are now, we really didn’t know how to reproduce that multi-layered sound that came from multi-tracking. But over time the idea of reproducing a studio sound went away as the 6 of us began to interlock and interact in ways that hadn’t been possibly before – the sum is definitely more than the parts.

Do you get the opportunity to check out much new music? Any highlights yet from this year?

MATT: I try to stay on top of it all...my highlights at any given time are always a composition of newly released music and my discovery of something that's been out for a long time. For instance, right now I've been really enjoying the new albums by Plants and Animals and Tumani Diabate. But I've also been listening to a lot of piano music – Bill Evans, McCoy Tyner, Samuel Barber. Stuff that's been out for years.
 
RYAN: Nothing that’s been released this year has really caught my ear yet that I can think of….I take that back, I got an album called Let My People Go by Darondo which was re-released this year I think. This guy was an underground soul master in the early 70’s and wow, this stuff is down and dirty and really good. I can only liken it to old Beck, if Beck lived in the early 70’s and was rumored to have been a pimp (which Darondo was). Last year I felt like there was a lot of good stuff – the Dirty Projectors, Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings, Tinariwen.

So what’s next? Are you eager to get back into the studio to keep up your momentum?

MATT: I've been on a pretty strong writing streak lately, and everyone's excited about the new stuff. As far as getting into a ‘studio’...we'd love to, considering that we've yet to go into a full-blown studio to record. The first two albums have been home-recorded. We love the results we've gotten, especially off the new record, but it'd be great to work with an engineer, or even the right producer, in a full-on studio space.

RYAN: I’ve been taking a break from lyrical song-writing, but I’ve been spending a lot of time just playing with textures. I got a big fat hollow-body electric guitar that I’ve been finding so many different feels and sounds with. We’ve been asked to work on some music for a documentary so that’s where my head has been recently. It feels nice to be able to not say anything or sing anything, just to feel my fingers on the strings and the weight of history in an old jazz guitar.

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