toledoblade.com --

O.A.R. has been chugging along just fine for years.

Fueled by a reputation as an energetic, dance-in-your-seat kind of act, O.A.R. - an acronym for Of A Revolution - has always enjoyed solid record sales, initially as a word-of-mouth college band at Ohio State University earlier this decade, and now as an established group in the same vein as jammy-popsters the Dave Matthews Band.

The group, which plays Tuesday night at 7 at the University of Toledo's Savage Arena, has even had a few of its songs turn up on national television, in Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, and in Ford commercials.

But pop radio success has remained steadfastly elusive for the quintet. Which explains O.A.R.'s "All Sides," a radio-friendly endeavor released last year that has commercial appeal written all over it. The album yielded the single "Shattered (Turn the Car Around)," which reached No. 2 on Billboard's Adult Pop chart.

"On 'All Sides' we discovered how to be O.A.R. in the studio," said Jerry DePizzo, O.A.R.'s saxophonist and the only Ohio native in the band. The 30-year-old is from Youngstown. "It took 12 years, but we finally figured it out. We weren't being led so much anymore as we were leading, going 'This is what we want to do.'

"On that record, we wanted to make three songs that had a radio pop sensibility to it. 'Shattered,' obviously ... that's just a damn good pop song regardless of whether O.A.R. does it, or John Mayer does it, or Dierks Bentley, for that matter. If you handed it to anyone, they would have gotten it on radio. Another song called 'One Day,' which never made it to radio but it's a beautiful song for the ladies. And another one called 'Try Me,' which was a middle-of-the-road rock tune kind of in the vein that the Fray would do, if they ever wanted to rock out once in a while."

But DePizzo said not to expect the band to continue flexing its pop muscle on its next album, due sometime in 2010.

"This next record is about making music that makes people feel good and ... making people dance and have fun," he said. "That's what we do really well, and that's what people react to, and that's what we're really here to do. Hopefully, instead of going completely down the center for the radio, maybe we can make radio just lean a little bit to the left to experience [O.A.R.]"

Here are some more thoughts from DePizzo:

Q: O.A.R. has a large presence on YouTube. Do you ever visit the site to see what's being posted from your shows?

A: I don't do it too often ... [but] I did go on [YouTube] today ... and I was watching kids do covers of "Shattered." There's these five Asian kids butchering the song. And there's this one who took a lot of artistic interpretation, she went way out in left field with it. [Then] there's this guy [who's] super serious and on the piano ... good stuff.

Q: How is that as an artist to watch your music be reinterpreted?

A: I love it, honestly, because I've butchered so many other people's songs. I think it's cool. If you can inspire people to take something that you do and make it their own, that's great. Even when we do covers ... we try to put our own little stamp and our own twist to it to make it fit what we do ... I can certainly understand somebody trying to do that to an O.A.R. song.

Q: As a jam band, how much do you revisit live recordings in your vault and resurrect some of O.A.R.'s older versions of songs and jams?

A: A song called "Revisited," I went back from 2006 and heard something we did that was kind of cool and just cut that piece out and sent that to everybody, "Hey, remember this?" "Dareh Meyod" is another one where we had an intro to it and then we did away with the intro for a while, [and] we were listening to an old version and said, "Oh, let's bring that back." It's kind of rehashing some old stuff, but also putting a new twist on it and doing it a little differently.

O.A.R., we're constantly evolving. If you saw us in 2001 and you saw us in 2009, we'll play some of the same songs, but they're done differently. There's different parts, the arrangements are different. We play a lot of shows. We've got to keep ourselves enthralled, and entertained, and focused as much as the audience needs to be as well. So we always try to switch things up.

Q: Do you find that your audience - especially hard-core O.A.R. fans - is tolerant of your evolution as musicians?

A: I think as musicians they welcome it. We've been fortunate enough that we've been around for a very long time. But we grew up and we learned how to play in front of people, which is somewhat uncomfortable looking back at it. Early on we weren't the greatest of musicians, but what we did together people really connected to and reacted to. For me to go back and listen to something we did in 1998, it's like nails on a chalkboard. But I also appreciate the innocence of it. We didn't know any better, we didn't know any more, we just went out there and worked with what we had. And people really dug it and got us to where we are today, so I certainly can't knock it too much.

I think some people would like us to write "Poker" over and over again, record after record, but I think that goes with any artists. There's always going to be people that say, "You're first record was your best, man." And there's other people that will say that your last record you did is the greatest thing, too. So I guess it's par for the course, and just part of being a musician and a band. If you're around long enough, you're going to have people that love you and people that hate you. That's just the way it is.

Q: How is that for you as a musician? Are you willing to cut artists some slack as they tinker with their sound, as they evolve?

A: That I welcome. Completely. It drives me nuts when I buy three albums by an artist and I'm like, "What's the ... difference? Why did I buy the third record, it's the same as the first?" It drives me nuts [and] there's a lot of bands like that. There's that fine balance between gradual evolution and going out and making your art record on your second record and completely throwing everyone for a jolt.

There needs to be some pop sense in there, some business sense ... that you may not be on the same page as your audience, and you've kind of got to lead them a little bit and maybe evolve a little slower than some people would like. There are some people who do it really great, and other people that bomb on it. Like John Mayer. John Mayer's done an awesome job of evolving, but still bringing his audience with him every step of the way. That guy melted faces as a guitar player in '99 and 2000. And it's like, "Why are you making this pop record when you can just burn people?" He's like, "I don't want to be Kenny Wayne [Shepherd], man, I want to be a pop star." So he goes and makes this sugary pop record and then gradually gets to the blues trio record, and then makes "Continuum," which brings it all together. Genius, absolute genius.

O.A.R. with Elmwood performs at 7 p.m. Tuesday in Savage Arena at the University of Toledo, 2801 West Bancroft St. Tickets are general admission and are $27.50 for the public and $17.50 for UT students; all tickets are $32.50 day of show. Information: 419-530-4653 or UTrockets.com or Ticketmaster.com.

Contact Kirk Baird at
kbaird@theblade.com
or 419-724-6734.

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