As the rock band O.A.R. approaches 30 years together, they gave unprecedented access to Robert Irvine Magazine to talk about their history, their partnership with the Robert Irvine Foundation, and their future, including an exclusive look at their upcoming album, Three Tinted Windows.

BY MATT TUTHILL

On a warm, sunny Tuesday morning in early May, Marc Roberge sits in music producer Gregg Wattenberg’s 5th avenue studio in Manhattan. Roberge, the lead singer, songwriter, and front man of O.A.R.—Of A Revolution—calls the place a “tree house” full of brilliant, free-spirited musicians. Some you’ve never heard of but maybe will someday. Others you’ve certainly heard of, like the Goo Goo Dolls. Just over a year ago, the bands bumped into each other in Wattenberg’s studio, quickly realized they share a lot of the same creative DNA, and wound up collaborating on a stirring cover of Tom Petty’s Won’t Back Down. They subsequently planned 2023’s Big Night Out co-headlining tour. From start to finish, the whole thing seemed so effortless and natural.

But for the artist, not every day is such. Like today. In fact, at the moment, Roberge can’t even get started. He is struggling with his laptop, shaking his head. “I’m not really sure what’s wrong with this thing,” he mutters, as an assistant enters to fiddle with it and ask if it’s been updated recently. Roberge says he isn’t sure, and spins his chair away from the console.

“It all used to be these big boards,” sighs Roberge, now 45. Despite the warm weather, he is layered in a T-shirt and a checkered blue flannel, black jeans, and black boots—dressed a bit like the guy he soon tells me he admired and emulated as a kid: Eddie Vedder. “Now all the recording is done on these laptops, which is great, but they bring their own problems.”

It’s not surprising that Roberge is feeling a bit nostalgic. As the band, which formed in 1996, approaches its 30th anniversary together, he’s putting the finishing touches on their new album, which will be titled Three Tinted Windows, an homage to the band’s humble high school beginnings; Roberge’s first car, “a piece of shit Honda Civic” sported an incomplete set of tinted windows and friends would gleefully carve their names on the roof’s interior.

In a minute, he says, he’s going to let me hear the title track on the new album. But first, we start from the beginning. The very beginning: an elementary school talent show in Rockville, Maryland, where he and childhood friends Richard On, O.A.R.’s lead guitarist, and Chris Culos, the drummer, then eighth graders, performed under the name Exposed Youth.

Roberge still remembers the raw nerves that shook all three of them, waiting out in the hallway to be called onto the stage. Nevertheless, they pushed through and rose to the occasion, performing two covers that sent the gymnasium into a raucous frenzy. In the crowd that day was Benj Gershman, a student one year younger who remembers, “They were these little rock stars and everyone loved it.” Gershman would join the band as the bassist a couple of years later, when they changed their name to O.A.R.

Roberge describes those early years as “Goonies-esque” and Three Tinted Windows is an attempt to recapture, in some measure, those care-free days. They rode their bikes, and later drove their crappy cars, to Culos’ house to practice in his basement. As the band showed ability beyond their years, friends would ask to come watch them jam.

“At a certain point, it just seemed like the amount of people who wanted to hang out in that basement were multiplying, and we had to cap it so we could actually practice because it became a distraction,” Gershman says.

Their rough and rugged debut album The Wanderer released in 1997. It was recorded when they were all still high schoolers in their late teens, and introduced the world to their own unique style; they are sometimes called an alternative rock band, but they are more often described as a jam band—with their reggae and jazz influences reinforcing this—but the songs are more focused than that. And since that first album, they’ve gone on to release 17 more—10 studio efforts and another eight live albums in total—with each of the studio albums growing sonically clearer and polished, practically perfect in their production.

The high-water marks of this shift are songs that thrust the band into the mainstream in a major way: their breakout single Love and Memories in 2005, and subsequent smash hits Shattered in 2008, and Peace in 2014. For as much as O.A.R.’s sound has continued to evolve, the one true line of demarcation is undoubtedly Love and Memories. The song’s opening chords are suffused with angst and yearning, but also seem to scream, in a way that defies any logical explanation, that the song you are about to hear is a bona fide hit. And it really was. It appeared on the band’s fifth album, Stories of a Stranger, which debuted at Number 40 on the Billboard 100 and led to the band’s first major radio play—and ultimately, a packed house at Madison Square Garden in early 2006.

When any band with a cult following suddenly goes big time, die-hard fan reaction is typically mixed. For O.A.R.’s fans, this held true: elation that “their guys” had made it, but also trepidation: Did O.A.R. still belong to them? Or were they now property of the masses and the charts?

Similar worries brewed within the band, only to a more severe degree.

“You want to talk about mixed emotions among fans? I had mixed emotions as a band member!” Culos says. “It was unlike anything we had ever written and I didn’t think it was in our best interest, direction-wise.”

“I was definitely a bit nervous about what our fans would think,” Richard On adds.

If Roberge was surer of the song, the after effects hit him the hardest.

“I remember standing on 34th Street and 8th Avenue and looking at the sign for Madison Square Garden and it said ‘O.A.R.: SOLD OUT’,” he says, speaking these last three words slowly and deliberately. “But I read it as,” and here he speaks very quickly, ‘OARsoldout.’ And it fucked me up. I was like, ‘Oh how bad is that?’ The idea that I could be working for 10 years, and it’s all I want to do, and it comes down to this one statement that we sold out and I can’t shake it.”

Here Roberge takes a deep breath and steadies himself.

“But then you play the show and you look out into the crowd and it’s like The Simpsons and you see your eighth grade teacher and all these people you know and you’re like, ‘No, this is good. This makes sense.’ And look: time heals these things where people who don’t get why you did what you did can see the growth and appreciate that. And if not, I get that, too. It’s fine.”

“Boy was I wrong,” Culos adds. “I didn’t see it at first, but I will admit that once it grew on me, I realized how special it was. It’s one of the songs I most look forward to playing live every night.”

Popularity and packed arenas, of course, never arrive without baggage. Exposure means scrutiny, and a New York Times review of that Garden show, while mostly positive—saying Atlantic Records should have no problem turning them into one of the biggest acts in music—is also laced with backhanded compliments and some outright invective, with the author calling the songs that bear reggae influences “dreadful”.

I bring this up and suggest that had the article been written today, this one critique would likely be the sole focus of a piece condemning their cultural appropriation. Roberge laughs heartily, and says, “Ya think?!” His follow-up, however, is very thoughtful.

“You have to understand where we were coming from. A lot of it was the Israel thing,” he says, referring to when he and Culos both took a semester of their junior year to study at Alexander Muss High School in Israel. (Both men, and Gershman, who would later attend a semester at the same high school during his senior year, are Jewish.) “That is where we adopted these sort of biblical references because we felt like we were right there dialed in with it completely. Now, this is a 17-year-old mind, but I’m standing on historical land, I’m learning about it, I’m writing about it, and it feels an awful lot like a wandering person, biblically, these same stories you heard for ages and ages.

“At the same time in the Washington, D.C. area where we grew up, late night radio is amazingly diverse; you’ve got gogo, reggae, jazz, all this stuff on 88.3, and 90.1. They were so great, and so many of the great reggae artists lived there and there’s a great culture there.

“We loved that sound. I couldn’t relate to the message, but I could relate to the rhythm, the heartbeat of it. Combined with the time in Israel, that’s how I wanted to tell this story. But we also feel like… we have to respect it. I’m not going to speak in a patois.

“So we absolutely felt like we had to educate ourselves. Junior Marvin, who played with Bob Marley and the Wailers, I said to him, ‘Will you please come teach us? We want to play Stir It Up. Teach us why the drumbeat is the way it is. Teach us why the guitar is the way it is.’ So again, that’s all before the Garden, so New York Times, go fuck yourselves.”

While we linger a moment on the topic of Israel, I take the opportunity to ask him if he’d have any hesitation about heading down the street to Columbia University and playing for the “anti-Zionist” protesters there. Perhaps a deeper cut from O.A.R. catalog, such as, To Zion Goes I?

Roberge smiles wide. “I would do that any day.”

He stops here, considering the moment, and the fact that, yet again, history is repeating itself and the Jewish people are being blamed for all manner of ills. “The thing is, the definitions are so screwed up right now,” he says. “The word ‘Zionist’ to me does not have a negative connotation. It’s people from all around the world in a diaspora, hopefully getting together and doing some positive things… I’m sitting back keeping tabs on all the crazy shit people are saying and doing. They feel like they can post on the internet and that makes them a good person.

“You think how cleverly you can construct a statement on the internet and backhand anyone who gets in your way, you think that makes you a good person and that it matters? It doesn’t matter. What are you doing in your life to make a positive contribution to society? If you’re doing that and not posting a damn thing, I’d much rather be around you even if you don’t think the same way as I do.

“My opinion shouldn’t matter to anyone. I live my life as my example and that’s it.”

*****

I ask Roberge if there’s a conscious effort, now three decades into the band’s run, of returning to an earthier sound. Yes, he says, but there are caveats; O.A.R. could chase a particular sound all they like, but nothing could ever recreate the chaotic circumstances that led to the release of The Wanderer.

For instance, Crazy Game of Poker—the first hit from that album, a song that sent college bars ballistic for the next decade—was conceived while Roberge got his first taste of freedom in Israel. The internal battle between indulging the temptations around him and escaping to a safer place set the table for him to tell a new story—one about a card game with the devil—and a storm of creative action followed, with Roberge returning to his dorm one day, grabbing his lyric book, and scribbling furiously. “‘Who’s up for game one? Who’s up for game two?’ I don’t even remember… I was just writing, writing, writing.”

But Roberge only had the foundations of it. And while the song was coming together musically in practice sessions once he and Culos returned to the States, it was incomplete. He would soon learn the truth of the adage “art from adversity” when the band booked their first recording session in March 1997.

“The guy is like, ‘You have 20 minutes left, play something’ and I said, ‘Let’s go,’ and we start playing this Crazy Game of Poker song,” Roberge recalls. After the first two verses, they entered uncharted territory.

“Chris breaks into halftime and I just start making up lyrics,” Roberge says, noting that everything from ‘So I said Johnny whatcha doin tonight?’ to his jazz scatting doesn’t just seem off the cuff, but is legitimately improvisational.

“It’s lightning in a bottle,” he says. “Like, a band performing an entire album in an afternoon and it’s a hit? It’s really hard to do, especially when you’re trying to have songs that have many lives… but, do we want to go back to that simplicity? Well, I think we have.”

He spins back to his laptop, which is now ready to go. He sorts through some files and clicks on one. It’s the title track, simple as advertised, and also heartfelt, with Roberge’s acoustic guitar leading the way over a chorus of, “and when the rain’s coming, I’ll keep the car running… let the wind blow, faded signals, and three tinted windows…”

When it’s done, he curls his lip, dissatisfied.

“But that guitar is off-time, too slow,” he says, “I need to fix it, and that’s what I’m doing today.” He stands up and pulls a guitar from a nearby rack full of them and sits back down. He strums a couple of chords, nods, ready, donning a pair of headphones and squaring up to the microphone. He plays his part for no more than 30 seconds before shaking his head again.

“That’s not the one for this,” he says, standing again, and swapping out the guitar.

He sits and plays again, this time through the entire song. He rolls his chair over to the laptop and listens back to what he just recorded. Satisfied, he replaces the old guitar file with the new one.

“So we played this all in a big room together,” he explains, “but every member of the band has a setup like this so we can make changes remotely.”

The newer recording technology is a boon for all artists, but especially for an older band comprised of family men scattered throughout the country; Roberge lives in Manhattan, Gershman in San Diego, Richard On in Virginia, Culos in Nashville, saxophonist Jerry DePizzo in Columbus, Ohio, with touring members Mikel Paris (keyboard) in Queens, and Jon Lampley (trumpet) in Brooklyn.

For the next two years, Roberge and company are laser-focused on the band. Their summer tour, which celebrates O.A.R.’s extensive catalog, is ongoing, and includes an August 18th show at Red Rocks in Colorado. The VIP experience that day includes a pre-show Breaking Bread With Heroes dinner with Robert Irvine and his namesake foundation, which will honor veterans and first responders. Leading up to the show, the band and the foundation held a fundraiser through Alltroo (a celebrity fundraising site akin to Omaze) with donations earning fans a chance to win air travel, two VIP tickets, dinner with Robert, access to soundcheck, and more.

“All of the money from Alltroo goes to the Robert Irvine Foundation,” Roberge says. The band has been supporting the Foundation for the last two years at its marquee fundraiser, Beats N Eats, each November in Philadelphia. Roberge linked up with Robert first in 2020, performing as a solo artist when the fundraiser was held virtually. When Beats N Eats returned live in 2021, Roberge was there to perform with Richard On, and O.A.R. proper has been headlining the event since 2022.

While O.A.R. has its own charity, the Heard The World Fund which gives money to underprivileged schools to buy musical instruments and computers, the partnership with the Robert Irvine Foundation allows them to make a bigger impact, with the band’s music drawing more attention and money to a charity that annually serves meals to tens of thousands of active duty servicemembers, veterans, and first responders, donates state-of-the-art mobility devices to disabled veterans, and provides a variety of other community services.

“Robert serves our military year-round,” Roberge says. “He doesn’t just talk the talk, he walks the walk every day and makes a real difference in people’s lives. Partnering with him is a no-brainer.”

O.A.R.’s desire to give back to the troops dates back to at least 2007 when, at the height of the troop surge, the band embarked on its first major USO tour, playing at FOBs (forward operating bases) in Iraq and Kuwait. Deeply moved by the experience of seeing Army doctors attending to the severely wounded on both sides—and not just enemy combatants, but also civilians injured in sectarian violence—Roberge returned to the States with an active desire to capture what was happening. As all artists know, sometimes the work comes from endless tinkering and craftsmanship, and sometimes, as Roberge explains, “It arrives on a platter, and you have to be ready, or else it doesn’t connect.”

Roberge and Richard On were ready. Huddled together in an LA apartment while working on the album All Sides, Richard played a hauntingly memorable guitar riff that made Roberge blurt out, “Oh my God…” and he wrote around it from there, producing lyrics just as breathtaking for what would become War Song. Today, when the band plays the song live, it is introduced as not a song for the war, but for the warrior. “Because no one wants to hear our opinion,” he says. “We’re not in the middle of it. Unless you back it up, no one wants your opinion. Who does back it up? The guys who get blown up and sign up again.”

*****

Describing the members of O.A.R. as merely humble or down-to-earth doesn’t quite cut it, and not only because those terms have been diluted through years of overuse describing any rocker or celebrity who isn’t an outright asshole. These men are something beyond humble; the friend from your hometown who worked his way up to assistant manager of the local car dealership is likely several orders of magnitude more full of himself than anyone in O.A.R., a band that has sold more than 2 million albums and at least as many concert tickets.

It’s easy to clock where they are in a room, even when they’re not talking. In fact, they’re usually not talking; a deferential politeness—ingrained early in their hometown where each of them got a job at 14, and reinforced in the Midwest where the founding members and DePizzo attended Ohio State—governs all their interactions, and they listen earnestly to whatever you have to say, whoever you happen to be, never peeking at their phones or over your shoulder in search of someone more interesting to talk to. This isn’t rock star behavior by any stretch, but it’s magnetic all the same—and it’s remarkable they manage to be such without sucking up all the available oxygen.

Another rockstar cliché they buck: they’re not “skinny”. Any musician living on a diet of vodka and cigarettes is skinny; these guys are lean and healthy, not to mention gracious and even a bit stylish in their own modest way. The rock band you can take home to meet mom and her Bridge club and be assured of a chorus of Aren’t they just so handsome? And clean-cut! Roberge may let the occasional F-bomb fly in conversation with a journalist, but he’s every bit the kind of guy who shuts it down when in more polite company.

That they have collectively maintained this look and demeanor is as improbable as the fact that they have stayed together for so long. But the change is there in the music: it is impossible to listen to the O.A.R. discography and not mark a significant difference in the band’s sound over the years. This is something present not just in the aforementioned mainstream hits, but even more so in the maturity of Roberge’s voice, his skills as a lyricist, and the musical complexity and mastery that surrounds him.

Thirty years, of course, changes anyone, but change is a two-way street; it isn’t just the artist living under new circumstances, but also the audience, and this has altered the context of certain songs in unexpected ways. Take About Mr. Brown, a track from the debut album about a local deviant we all know—a lousy dad and husband who stays out late and does whatever he wants. Like everything else in O.A.R.’s catalog, it has matured and evolved through years of live performance. In this case, it is a better song musically, sure, but it has also transformed into something much more chilling and poignant, perhaps, than ever intended by its teenage author. Originally an indictment of hypocritical adults, the meaning of the song is now flipped; as O.A.R.’s fans confront middle age, the lyric “What do you lie about to your wife?” is no longer a question being asked of a composite character. Rather, it is one Roberge seems to be asking the audience. To hear him belt out this line in a live show amidst a crescendo of instrumentation, it does indeed, as the kids say, hit different.

And while Crazy Game of Poker was the song that endeared them to a generation of kids who turned the song into a mad ritual, jumping around wildly to its opening notes, it too has evolved into a more complex animal, subjected to nearly endless experimentation and improvisation. It was never a short song—the original clocks in at nearly nine minutes—but the band has played versions that last upwards of 20 minutes. Despite that runtime, this isn’t bloated, meandering jam band stuff that just won’t seem to end; there’s brand new instrumentation and lyrics positioned before the “base” song, providing a two- to three-minute ramp up. When the original piece finishes, there’s more new music and lyrics, including the refrain, “May God be with me,” a single line that seems to reflect the band’s humility and gratitude for having come through their early rise in a hard-partying atmosphere, surrounded, naturally, by no one who would tell them no.

In their hometown of Rockville, adults aware of the band’s prospects accepted, or at least looked the other way, when these talented young kids were smoking weed. Experimentation with psychedelics followed—“way too early” according to Roberge—and they were surely not ready for life on the road. Certainly not a bus tour with Kid Rock, which happened early on. “If he had strippers onstage, you can use your imagination for what was going on backstage,” Roberge says. One such bus tour took them to El Paso, TX. After the show, someone had the bright idea to walk into Mexico to keep the party going. “And we have no idea how far it is, but it’s not possible.” (Ciudad Juarez is nine miles off, plus the Rio Grande is in the way.) “So we wind up climbing up a billboard. You look back at that and say ‘Oh my God, all the bad things that could have happened…’”

At one point, Roberge called his older brother, then the band’s manager, from a pay phone, and remembers crying into the receiver, “I can’t do this. I don’t even know what day it is.”

“We were living every cliché you could think of,” Roberge remembers. “But we were able to wake up and get knocked back into the center. Now those bumpers, those guard rails, are so important, and they’re wholesome… and awesome.”

Putting those wild nights in the rearview changed another song. When Conquering Fools appeared on The Wanderer, the lyrics only told a story of a young, globe-trotting man in search of treasure. Today, its new lyrics indicate a band that has journeyed into a life of family and cleaner habits: “When no substance controls you… you done conquer that fool… and when that alcohol cannot own you… you done conquer that fool.”

Finding a wholesome center began with finding love. The core members are all married now, and most of them have kids. Roberge’s wife, Nassim, was his high school best friend, but the two never became involved romantically until college when he called to wish her happy birthday and they talked long into the night. And the next night. And the night after that. Now married for 20 years, they have three children together, ages 14, 12, and 7. Nassim runs the band’s charity and has traveled with them overseas to visit the troops. Their trip to Iraq was of particular interest, offering her a chance to get at close as she ever would be to her homeland as her father, an Iranian dissident, was banned from returning.

Another guardrail Roberge has found: making music with his kids. Usually, the goal is to have no goal and simply enjoy some unstructured free play with no judgments at the end. Music for the sake of music. He says the kids are developing great instincts and talent, even if they don’t have a firm grasp on exactly who their father is. “Last night I’m brushing my teeth, I’m half asleep, and there’s a knock on the door. My kid is like ‘My teacher said she really liked a song of yours,’ and I said ‘What song?’ and he said ‘Something… turn the car around?’ Roberge laughs hard. “I said, ‘Yeah, that song is why we have this house.’”

His kids have also chided him for not “dropping” frequently enough on Spotify. As the conversation turns to the streaming giant, Roberge reflects yet again, happy that the band embraced a “tickets and T-shirts” model of doing business the moment Napster made its debut; their manager being prescient enough to realize it wasn’t just a gimmick, but an existential threat to the industry.

Originally, the band had made inroads on college campuses through a sales rep program; send a box of CDs to a student, who’s instructed to sell as many as possible and, once they hit a wall, give away the rest. The important thing was to get the e-mail addresses of anyone who bought or received a CD.

“No one has more .edu e-mail addresses than we do,” Roberge says. “We had boots on the ground in every major college in America. We knew what the fuck was going on because of this list. People would tell us, ‘Yo, everyone knows your words at these bars in Tucson,’ so we’d suck it up and go. We encouraged people to tape our shows from way back in the day because we saw Dave Matthews Band doing it and he saw the Dead doing it. So when CDs went away and we were fine with that… We embraced the Napster thing because we could see where the downloads were coming from and we’d just go there.”

Spotify and other streamers don’t provide artists with data that would allow them to micro target in this fashion anymore, but Shazam does, and Roberge explains that a burst of Shazam activity in one area indicates that a friendly radio station must be nearby.

He tries to impart this knowledge to younger artists, including many who pass through Wattenberg’s “treehouse” on 5th Avenue.

“I see these kids come in—incredibly talented kids—with millions of streams and no money. I say, ‘You have to play a show, I don’t care what that show is. You have to.’”

Roberge’s solo shows often incorporate these younger artists. He hopes by his example to show them that music as a career can still work if you play your cards right.

They would need to look no further than the ambitious slate O.A.R. has planned for the next two years. All this looking back would seem to have given the band the ability to see with perfect clarity exactly what they want from their future. In addition to the ongoing tour celebrating the existing catalog, they now boast their very own music festival. This year, the Ocean’s Calling Festival in Ocean City, Md., will be held in late September, and welcomes acts like Blink-182, Dave Matthews Band, The Killers, The Offspring, and more—as well Irvine, who will be on hand to cook. Tickets are sold out.

The icing on the cake: A return to the Garden in early 2026. A child of the Nineties and now a full-blooded New Yorker, Roberge had the idea to bring the whole building back to what it was the year the band formed. “You go in and it’s like we just won the Stanley Cup. Banners of Messier, Leech, the whole thing… and throwback pricing. I want most people to be able to get in for 30 bucks.

“Ideally, it’s a family night.”

There couldn’t be a more fitting sentiment from the band you can take home to mom.

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Matt Tuthill is the VP of content and communications for Robert Irvine. Learn more at matt-tuthill.com