Oak & Ash & Sand & Nail

This remarkably unremarkable short-lived trio (and some-time equally unremarkable quartet) from the well-to-do North Atlanta suburb, Vinings, GA. were college-boy, roots-rock dilettantes with too much time and money on their hands. They never bothered to listen to, much less learn a single Kris Kristofferson song. Their whole shtick was less “Sunday Morning Coming Down” and more “Friday Night Let’s Use My Dad’s Credit Card.” OASN’s obviously manufactured ‘pain’ and ostentatious yearning for ‘life on the road’ proved to be their quick downfall, along with blatant unoriginality and a distinct lack of experience of, you know, ‘life on the road’.  

It’s true these kids had (their parents’) money to burn* and their (parents’) money lasted for two full albums of what was, for all intents and purposes, re-written Dawes songs, before the jig was up. Daddy wasn’t going to pay the piper, or any other session musicians for that matter, ever again.

During their heyday, which lasted for two or three months after their second album (We Are There, 2016), the core group of three (Jespers was unable to go on the road—especially in Spring, due to nut and freshly-mown grass allergies) could pull moderate crowds at a few venues in Nashville, but the audience was comprised mostly of college buddies who they had bribed with the lure of free beer. As with many groups at this level, band and audience looked pretty much the same: trucker caps, jean jackets, tattoos, and stubble. They were accurately, if unkindly, described as “Nashville Brobots”.

A week before that appearance, a nugget of unfortunate publicity appeared in The Fire Note blog where their copy-cat of the Dawes-style was so obvious that Taylor Hawkins, lead singer of Dawes, had taken to calling them Oak & Ash & Plagiarism. This ended up being the most famous thing about them. A doomed SXSW day-party gig at a rented Mexican bar on the far North side of Austin called Shimmy’s finally put paid to their career. A grand total of four people, all old college friends currently living in Texas, showed up at the place.

They wanted to be bad boys and, in a sense, they got what they wanted: they were, it turns out, pretty bad. 

OASN ended up renting an over-priced office on Gallatin Pike in East Nashville and forming a music business marketing and consulting firm called EASTWESTNORTHSOUTH. They went out of business after less than two years, surviving as long as they did by simply by doing to others what had been done to them. 

After being #metoo’d by four of the female college interns he had personally hired from the University Of Georgia’s Music Business Program, lead singer Kilmer Patton moved to Norway, where he found work cooking and playing at an “American style” BBQ joint. The rest of the band went back to working for their family businesses, but still dine out on that time when they were rock stars.    

*If you search back far enough in Kilmer Patton’s personal Instagram page you can literally see him drunkenly setting a hundred dollar bill alight.