Most days I feel myself pretty good en happy. On these days I've been working hard and good and I feel even better when I can end the day with a nice post about a fantastic new band. I had this feeling the last two days and I think that today could also be such a wonderful day. I've just been reading the information I received about the American musician and idealist Ryan Costello, the frontman of The OaKs. Ryan has lived and worked in Afghanistan for two years since 2003 to teach returned refugees some agricultural techniques. You can find some nice pictures of this country on his website. At night he took his guitar and tried to put his impressions of the day on music and words.
After his return to Orlando, Florida he started working with his friend Matthew Antolick to translate these musical sketches into songs. The result was the first The OaKs album "Our Fathers and The Things They Left Behind" which was released in 2006.
Soon after that Ryan and Matthew realised that they needed a band to perform these songs live. The Oaks were completed with Jeremy Siegel, Tim Cocking, Greg Wilson and Melissa Reyes. The chemistry between these six musicians is wonderful, according to people who have seen the band live and new songs were born out of this chemistry. Songs which can be found on the new album by The OaKs "Songs for Waiting" which will be released in a month. One of the songs on this CD is "Masood", a song about a young Afghan friend of Ryan and about the Afghan war hero Akhmad Shah Masood who was killed in 2002.
This song is, like the rest of the songs on this record, a nice mixture of pop, rock, jazz, folk and sometimes a bit of world music. You could compare the music a bit with the music of Beirut. However, it's very interesting music!
>mp3: Masood
>album stream: Songs for Waiting