Oak is Keeping is a four-piece rock group from Austin. If you are a fan of Cream, Spoon, or Queens of the Stone Age, you’ll dig the style of OiK. They are making some major waves at the moment and TwoGroove is proud to make them a featured artist. Check out the interview and pictures below but don’t forget to listen to the music and give it a rating! Also check out their new CD, Animal Style.

Members/Instruments:

Shay Isdale: Vocals/Guitar

Mastin Kirksey: Drums

Zac Bogart: Guitar/backing vox

Adam Keeling: Bass/backing vox

Year Formed: 2007

1. What is your musical background?
Classic rock, 90’s rock, indie rock, folk, jazz, country, metal – you name it, there is probably someone in the group that is a fan of it!

2. What is the significance of the name?
Our 1st name was Dead Leaves, but some now defunct nu-metal band wanted to sue us for the name… so they kept it. HA! But, Robert Frost has a poem with this little line that said: “The leaves are all dead on the ground, Save those that the oak is keeping.” We liked it – and we became, Oak is Keeping. We had some other really terrible names on the table, so we made the right decision.

3. Who writes your songs and what is the songwriting process?
Our songwriting process is a group one – we are all in this band together, so we write together. Someone will always come in with a song idea, and then we cut it open, inspect all the little parts, rearrange it and put it back together. Sometimes a song is born from that, sometimes it needs to be cut open again and rearranged. Song writing can be the best time the band has and the most frustrating – all in the same night.

4. What are your musical influences?
Cream, Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, QOTSA, ‘tallica, Neil Young, Alice in Chains – I mean, I can go on and on. We love the great classic rock bluesy artists, 90’s grunge, modern indie, metal…. It’s all in there.

5. How would you describe your music to someone who has never heard it?
It’s like that feeling you get when you kiss a girl, that you’ve really wanted to kiss, for the first time – then being punched in the head at the same time. And if that doesn’t work – I’d say we are fuzzy riff driven rock and roll full of harmonies and wonderful tones.

6. What are your short-term goals (next 6 months – 2 years)?
Write and play music anywhere and everywhere we possibly can. It would be nice to get our music to as many people as possible – but there are many ways to do that in this day and age.

7. What about your long term goals?
Write and play music anywhere and everywhere we possibly can. Music is fun – no reason to stop. It would be nice to be headlining ACL instead of watching the headliners, but we’ll see:)

8. What would “success” look like for you?
Success for us would be our music reaching more people that we ever thought possible. Already our debut album, Animal Style, has started to make some waves around other parts of the country we didn’t even think knew about us!

9. What are you most proud of in your music career so far?
Being selected as finalists in not 1, but 2 major contests in the last couple month – since releasing our debut album. One contest is with Spin Magazine and baseball. The editor of Spin picked us as his #2 favorite band in the group of over 400 that applied.

Our CD release party at Red Eyed Fly in April was pretty awesome. Our fans truly came out in masses and packed that place. It was a very memorable moment for OiK. THANK YOU!

10. Where can people find more of your music?
Animal Style is spreading like wild fire! In Austin, you can get it at Waterloo, Cheapo Disc and End of an Ear. It is also everywhere online – iTunes, CDBaby.com, Amazon and other sites we don’t even know. You can also buy it directly from us at www.oakiskeeping.com or from our shows.

11. Anything else you want to say? Stories to share? Shameless promotions to be had?

As I said earlier, we are in 2 major contests.

Spin and Baseball – if our song wins, we will be featured in MLB2K10. The editor of Spin and the singer of Hold Steady both listened to our song and picked it as one of the finalist. So that’s pretty exciting. And as I type this, we are in 2nd place and closing ground on 1st!!!

Airwalk and Spin. Yeah, Spin Magazine again – haha. This is Airwalk’s 4th annual “Unsigned Hero – Road to Austin” contest, where the winner receives a couple shows on the Spin stage during SXSW 2010, plus a paid trip to Austin (which we really wouldn’t need) and $5k. Big, big prize for us! We are 1 of only 10 finalists and voting will start in August.

We will be re-launching our webpage very soon, so check it out for updates. Join our mailing list maybe – we do giveaways through there too!

www.oakiskeeping.com