There was a version of me in my twenties who would have absolutely hated admitting how much I loved O.A.R. At the time, I was a somewhat wayward twenty-something still carrying around the musical arrogance of someone who considered himself a rocker and hip-hop obsessive and instinctively regarded anything remotely adjacent to the collegiate jam-band universe with suspicion. O.A.R. initially sounded like music for people wearing cargo shorts, shell necklaces and flip-flops while tossing Frisbees on a college quad. I wanted guitars with menace and rappers with something to prove.
Then I started working at Abercrombie. And somewhere amid the cologne, impossibly loud music, dim lighting, beautiful people, ridiculous clothes and strange little alternate universe that was early-2000s Abercrombie culture, O.A.R. began working its way into me, as did the mandatory flip flops and cargo shorts uniform.
The resistance didn't last. Their songs became connected to that period of my life in a way music sometimes does without asking permission. What initially seemed too earnest, too collegiate and perhaps simply too uncool eventually became part of the soundtrack to an unexpectedly fun chapter I still remember with enormous affection.
So finally seeing O.A.R. live on a warm Sunday night at San Diego State University's Cal Coast Credit Union Open Air Theatre felt less like checking off another legacy act and more like encountering a piece of my own history that I had somehow never seen in person. And they were fucking great.
O.A.R.'s San Diego stop was part of its Three Decades Tour, celebrating an improbable 30-year run for a band whose origins stretch back to childhood friends playing together long before mainstream success arrived. Gavin DeGraw and Lisa Loeb joined the tour as special guests, and Sunday's advertised show began at 6:30pm at the nearly 5,000-capacity outdoor SDSU venue.
Unfortunately, I managed to create perhaps the most ridiculous scheduling problem imaginable: O.A.R. and Gipsy Kings were playing San Diego on the same night. So rather than seeing Loeb and DeGraw, I was across town at The Rady Shell watching Nicolas Reyes and Gipsy Kings produce one of the most exhilarating performances I've seen this year. Then we left the waterfront and hauled ass to SDSU because there was no chance I was letting O.A.R. play San Diego again without finally seeing them. It turned into an absurdly good night of live music.
By the time I arrived, O.A.R. was deep into a sprawling 22-song set that demonstrated just how misleading the casual shorthand around this band can be. "Jam band" gets attached to O.A.R. constantly, and there is obviously truth to it, but seeing them live reveals something much broader. This is a substantial ensemble filled with legitimately accomplished musicians, augmented by horns and capable of moving almost frictionlessly among rock, reggae, pop, soul and improvisational passages without allowing the performance to dissolve into indulgent noodling.
That mattered to me because musicianship is what separates nostalgia from an actual concert. There are plenty of bands that can reproduce the songs people remember. O.A.R. still sounds like a working band. The arrangements breathe. Songs stretch. Horns arrive at precisely the right moment. Rhythms loosen and tighten. Marc Roberge is an enormously charismatic frontman without behaving as though every second requires a frontman pose, and the musicians around him are good enough that attention naturally shifts across the stage. The whole operation feels remarkably organic.
That quality was especially obvious during the covers, which were among my favorite parts of the evening. Their rendition of Pearl Jam's "Elderly Woman Behind the Counter in a Small Town" was fantastic. Roberge somehow summoned just enough Eddie Vedder in his delivery to make the song immediately recognizable without sliding into impersonation. For someone who came of age worshipping '90s rock, hearing that unmistakable opening progression materialize inside an O.A.R. show was an unexpected gift.
Then came an even stranger collision of musical worlds during "City on Down," which folded pieces of U2's "With or Without You" and Taylor Swift's "All Too Well" into the performance. On paper, that combination looks almost deranged. Live, it worked.
So finally seeing O.A.R. live on a warm Sunday night at San Diego State University's Cal Coast Credit Union Open Air Theatre felt less like checking off another legacy act and more like encountering a piece of my own history that I had somehow never seen in person. And they were fucking great.
O.A.R.'s San Diego stop was part of its Three Decades Tour, celebrating an improbable 30-year run for a band whose origins stretch back to childhood friends playing together long before mainstream success arrived. Gavin DeGraw and Lisa Loeb joined the tour as special guests, and Sunday's advertised show began at 6:30pm at the nearly 5,000-capacity outdoor SDSU venue.
Unfortunately, I managed to create perhaps the most ridiculous scheduling problem imaginable: O.A.R. and Gipsy Kings were playing San Diego on the same night. So rather than seeing Loeb and DeGraw, I was across town at The Rady Shell watching Nicolas Reyes and Gipsy Kings produce one of the most exhilarating performances I've seen this year. Then we left the waterfront and hauled ass to SDSU because there was no chance I was letting O.A.R. play San Diego again without finally seeing them. It turned into an absurdly good night of live music.
By the time I arrived, O.A.R. was deep into a sprawling 22-song set that demonstrated just how misleading the casual shorthand around this band can be. "Jam band" gets attached to O.A.R. constantly, and there is obviously truth to it, but seeing them live reveals something much broader. This is a substantial ensemble filled with legitimately accomplished musicians, augmented by horns and capable of moving almost frictionlessly among rock, reggae, pop, soul and improvisational passages without allowing the performance to dissolve into indulgent noodling.
That mattered to me because musicianship is what separates nostalgia from an actual concert. There are plenty of bands that can reproduce the songs people remember. O.A.R. still sounds like a working band. The arrangements breathe. Songs stretch. Horns arrive at precisely the right moment. Rhythms loosen and tighten. Marc Roberge is an enormously charismatic frontman without behaving as though every second requires a frontman pose, and the musicians around him are good enough that attention naturally shifts across the stage. The whole operation feels remarkably organic.
That quality was especially obvious during the covers, which were among my favorite parts of the evening. Their rendition of Pearl Jam's "Elderly Woman Behind the Counter in a Small Town" was fantastic. Roberge somehow summoned just enough Eddie Vedder in his delivery to make the song immediately recognizable without sliding into impersonation. For someone who came of age worshipping '90s rock, hearing that unmistakable opening progression materialize inside an O.A.R. show was an unexpected gift.
Then came an even stranger collision of musical worlds during "City on Down," which folded pieces of U2's "With or Without You" and Taylor Swift's "All Too Well" into the performance. On paper, that combination looks almost deranged. Live, it worked.
That's part of O.A.R.'s peculiar appeal. For all of the assumptions people make about their music, there has always been an unusually democratic quality to it. They don't seem particularly worried about whether Pearl Jam, reggae, U2, pop, horns and sprawling improvisation belong in the same room. If something feels good inside the song, they use it.
Maybe that's what younger me initially failed to understand. I was still organizing music into tribes. Rock over here. Hip-hop over there. Certain things cool, other things embarrassing. O.A.R. never seemed especially interested in those borders. Their audience certainly isn't.
And after thirty years, that lack of self-consciousness has aged remarkably well. The band's history is itself an unlikely one. O.A.R. began among childhood friends in Maryland before members continued the project while attending Ohio State University, building an audience largely through relentless touring, college word-of-mouth and the kind of fan-to-fan music sharing that existed before streaming algorithms could manufacture a viral moment. Their 1997 debut The Wanderer established the foundation, while songs including "That Was a Crazy Game of Poker" became live calling cards long before more mainstream breakthroughs such as "Love and Memories" and "Shattered (Turn the Car Around)" expanded their audience in the 2000s.
"Shattered" remains one of those songs that can instantly transport me back to a specific era. Hearing it live Sunday was exactly what I wanted it to be. The song has enough polish to have become a genuine radio hit but still retains the emotional directness that made O.A.R. appealing in the first place. There is nothing coy about it. It's big, melodic, slightly wounded and built to be sung with thousands of other people. And thousands did.
But nothing prepared me for "That Was a Crazy Game of Poker." If you know O.A.R., you know the song isn't merely another item in the catalog. It has effectively become a ritual. The band's relationship with "Poker" stretches back to its earliest years, and live versions have long expanded far beyond the confines of the studio recording. Sunday night turned it into complete lunacy.
Playing cards began flying through the air. Not a few cards. Not some cute little staged flourish near the front. Cards were fucking everywhere.
They fluttered above the crowd, spun through the lights, landed on heads and shoulders, got scooped up and thrown again. For the duration of the song, portions of Cal Coast looked as though a casino had exploded over the audience.
And somehow it perfectly captured what makes O.A.R. work. The spectacle wasn't technological. Nobody needed pyro, twenty dancers or a screen the size of an apartment building. The audience created the visual effect themselves because they understood the ritual and wanted to participate in it.
It was communal in the oldest possible sense of live music: band plays song, audience transforms it into something bigger. That may sound simple, but increasingly it isn't.
Modern concerts are frequently engineered down to the second, with enormous productions so precisely programmed that you can watch footage from different cities and see nearly identical movements, visuals and transitions. There is tremendous skill in that kind of performance, but O.A.R. operates differently. Their music leaves room for things to happen.
Sunday felt alive because it didn't seem hermetically sealed. A horn line could breathe a little longer. A song could open up. A cover could materialize. Lisa Loeb could join the band for "The Stranger." Nicholas Radina could appear on "Hey Girl." A stadium full of playing cards could suddenly become part of the show.
The Three Decades Tour is deliberately built around that history, with O.A.R. drawing from across its catalog while touring with DeGraw and Loeb on the San Diego date. And although I regret missing both opening sets because of my cross-city musical insanity, seeing Loeb appear within O.A.R.'s portion of the evening at least offered one small connection to what we'd missed.
There was another thing I hadn't really anticipated: how much memory would be attached to all of it. Music is uniquely capable of collapsing time. I could hear a song Sunday night in 2026 and suddenly remember being in my twenties, managing an Abercrombie & Fitch, having absolutely no idea where my life was going and somehow having an incredible amount of fun anyway. I remember the absurd sensory overload of those stores, the people I worked with, the clothes, the music and the strange confidence of being young enough to believe adulthood was something still waiting somewhere ahead.
O.A.R. became tangled up in that version of me. That's why nostalgia, when handled badly, can be cheap. It simply asks us to remember that something existed. Handled well, it does something much stranger: it momentarily lets us inhabit ourselves again.
Sunday wasn't powerful because O.A.R. reminded me that I once listened to O.A.R. It was powerful because the music briefly reconnected me with the person who first learned to love it, arrogant musical opinions and all.
And there was something satisfying about realizing that the band itself had matured without becoming embarrassed by what it was. They still play "Hey Girl." They still play "About an Hour Ago." They still play "Crazy Game of Poker." They still let those songs stretch out and breathe. They also have "Shattered," "Love and Memories," "Heaven," "Peace" and decades of later material demonstrating that they became something much larger than the college circuit that initially sustained them.
O.A.R.'s endurance is particularly interesting because they never really occupied the center of American pop culture. They became enormously successful without becoming omnipresent. There was no period where O.A.R. swallowed popular music whole. Instead, they built something arguably more durable: a huge population of people for whom the band means something very specific.
You could feel that throughout Cal Coast. People weren't merely waiting for the recognizable singles. Older material landed with equal or greater force. The crowd knew when to sing, knew where songs were going and, obviously, knew when to start throwing playing cards into the sky. Most of the packed house seemed to have the same youthful smile plastered across their faces.
Thirty years is a long time for any band to maintain that kind of relationship with an audience. Even more impressive is that O.A.R. still sounds hungry enough to deserve it.
The horn section adds enormous dimension to the live sound. The rhythm section is muscular without overwhelming the songs. Guitar parts remain clean and purposeful. Roberge's voice retains the slightly weathered warmth that makes these songs sound conversational even when thousands of people are singing them back at him. The result is polished without feeling antiseptic.
And after racing across San Diego from Gipsy Kings, perhaps the greatest compliment I can give O.A.R. is that the night never felt like we had arrived at the lesser half of a doubleheader. Gipsy Kings had been astonishing. Different venue, different musical tradition, completely different emotional energy. O.A.R. met them on entirely different terrain.
They gave me memory, looseness, communal joy and one of the strangest visual moments I've seen at a concert this year as playing cards filled the night air. By the end, I found myself thinking about how funny musical identity can be.
Twenty-something me initially didn't want to like O.A.R. because I had apparently decided liking certain music said something about who I was. Forty-something me finds that idea exhausting.
Good music survives our posturing. Great music occasionally outlives the person we were when we discovered it.
Sunday night, O.A.R. sounded less like a guilty remnant of some Abercrombie chapter and more like what they had probably been all along: an exceptionally good band with an unusually intimate connection to its audience and a catalog capable of carrying people through decades of their lives. I just needed thirty years and a rainstorm of playing cards to fully appreciate it.
And somewhere, that wayward kid in Abercrombie probably finally stopped pretending he was too cool to admit it.
Originally published on August 11, 2026.
Maybe that's what younger me initially failed to understand. I was still organizing music into tribes. Rock over here. Hip-hop over there. Certain things cool, other things embarrassing. O.A.R. never seemed especially interested in those borders. Their audience certainly isn't.
And after thirty years, that lack of self-consciousness has aged remarkably well. The band's history is itself an unlikely one. O.A.R. began among childhood friends in Maryland before members continued the project while attending Ohio State University, building an audience largely through relentless touring, college word-of-mouth and the kind of fan-to-fan music sharing that existed before streaming algorithms could manufacture a viral moment. Their 1997 debut The Wanderer established the foundation, while songs including "That Was a Crazy Game of Poker" became live calling cards long before more mainstream breakthroughs such as "Love and Memories" and "Shattered (Turn the Car Around)" expanded their audience in the 2000s.
"Shattered" remains one of those songs that can instantly transport me back to a specific era. Hearing it live Sunday was exactly what I wanted it to be. The song has enough polish to have become a genuine radio hit but still retains the emotional directness that made O.A.R. appealing in the first place. There is nothing coy about it. It's big, melodic, slightly wounded and built to be sung with thousands of other people. And thousands did.
But nothing prepared me for "That Was a Crazy Game of Poker." If you know O.A.R., you know the song isn't merely another item in the catalog. It has effectively become a ritual. The band's relationship with "Poker" stretches back to its earliest years, and live versions have long expanded far beyond the confines of the studio recording. Sunday night turned it into complete lunacy.
Playing cards began flying through the air. Not a few cards. Not some cute little staged flourish near the front. Cards were fucking everywhere.
They fluttered above the crowd, spun through the lights, landed on heads and shoulders, got scooped up and thrown again. For the duration of the song, portions of Cal Coast looked as though a casino had exploded over the audience.
And somehow it perfectly captured what makes O.A.R. work. The spectacle wasn't technological. Nobody needed pyro, twenty dancers or a screen the size of an apartment building. The audience created the visual effect themselves because they understood the ritual and wanted to participate in it.
It was communal in the oldest possible sense of live music: band plays song, audience transforms it into something bigger. That may sound simple, but increasingly it isn't.
Modern concerts are frequently engineered down to the second, with enormous productions so precisely programmed that you can watch footage from different cities and see nearly identical movements, visuals and transitions. There is tremendous skill in that kind of performance, but O.A.R. operates differently. Their music leaves room for things to happen.
Sunday felt alive because it didn't seem hermetically sealed. A horn line could breathe a little longer. A song could open up. A cover could materialize. Lisa Loeb could join the band for "The Stranger." Nicholas Radina could appear on "Hey Girl." A stadium full of playing cards could suddenly become part of the show.
The Three Decades Tour is deliberately built around that history, with O.A.R. drawing from across its catalog while touring with DeGraw and Loeb on the San Diego date. And although I regret missing both opening sets because of my cross-city musical insanity, seeing Loeb appear within O.A.R.'s portion of the evening at least offered one small connection to what we'd missed.
There was another thing I hadn't really anticipated: how much memory would be attached to all of it. Music is uniquely capable of collapsing time. I could hear a song Sunday night in 2026 and suddenly remember being in my twenties, managing an Abercrombie & Fitch, having absolutely no idea where my life was going and somehow having an incredible amount of fun anyway. I remember the absurd sensory overload of those stores, the people I worked with, the clothes, the music and the strange confidence of being young enough to believe adulthood was something still waiting somewhere ahead.
O.A.R. became tangled up in that version of me. That's why nostalgia, when handled badly, can be cheap. It simply asks us to remember that something existed. Handled well, it does something much stranger: it momentarily lets us inhabit ourselves again.
Sunday wasn't powerful because O.A.R. reminded me that I once listened to O.A.R. It was powerful because the music briefly reconnected me with the person who first learned to love it, arrogant musical opinions and all.
And there was something satisfying about realizing that the band itself had matured without becoming embarrassed by what it was. They still play "Hey Girl." They still play "About an Hour Ago." They still play "Crazy Game of Poker." They still let those songs stretch out and breathe. They also have "Shattered," "Love and Memories," "Heaven," "Peace" and decades of later material demonstrating that they became something much larger than the college circuit that initially sustained them.
O.A.R.'s endurance is particularly interesting because they never really occupied the center of American pop culture. They became enormously successful without becoming omnipresent. There was no period where O.A.R. swallowed popular music whole. Instead, they built something arguably more durable: a huge population of people for whom the band means something very specific.
You could feel that throughout Cal Coast. People weren't merely waiting for the recognizable singles. Older material landed with equal or greater force. The crowd knew when to sing, knew where songs were going and, obviously, knew when to start throwing playing cards into the sky. Most of the packed house seemed to have the same youthful smile plastered across their faces.
Thirty years is a long time for any band to maintain that kind of relationship with an audience. Even more impressive is that O.A.R. still sounds hungry enough to deserve it.
The horn section adds enormous dimension to the live sound. The rhythm section is muscular without overwhelming the songs. Guitar parts remain clean and purposeful. Roberge's voice retains the slightly weathered warmth that makes these songs sound conversational even when thousands of people are singing them back at him. The result is polished without feeling antiseptic.
And after racing across San Diego from Gipsy Kings, perhaps the greatest compliment I can give O.A.R. is that the night never felt like we had arrived at the lesser half of a doubleheader. Gipsy Kings had been astonishing. Different venue, different musical tradition, completely different emotional energy. O.A.R. met them on entirely different terrain.
They gave me memory, looseness, communal joy and one of the strangest visual moments I've seen at a concert this year as playing cards filled the night air. By the end, I found myself thinking about how funny musical identity can be.
Twenty-something me initially didn't want to like O.A.R. because I had apparently decided liking certain music said something about who I was. Forty-something me finds that idea exhausting.
Good music survives our posturing. Great music occasionally outlives the person we were when we discovered it.
Sunday night, O.A.R. sounded less like a guilty remnant of some Abercrombie chapter and more like what they had probably been all along: an exceptionally good band with an unusually intimate connection to its audience and a catalog capable of carrying people through decades of their lives. I just needed thirty years and a rainstorm of playing cards to fully appreciate it.
And somewhere, that wayward kid in Abercrombie probably finally stopped pretending he was too cool to admit it.
Originally published on August 11, 2026.
