Photo via the O.A.R. Facebook page

Maryland-bred, Ohio-grown act O.A.R. are currently on the road celebrating their 30th anniversary with the Three Decades tour. Gavin DeGraw and KT Tunstall have been supplying opening duties during the latest leg of the amphitheater run and joining the evening’s headliners each night for a sing-along take on The Band classic “The Weight” each night.

Adding to the festivities, on September 1, at Minneapolis, MN’s Minneapolis Armory, the group shared the stage with another surprise guest. Fourteen songs into their set, O.A.R. brought out Vulfpeck guitarist and local hero Cory Wong to sit in on a 10-minute version of “Anyway,” an original they have been playing since 2001 and included on both 2002’s live release Any Time Now and the 2003 album In Between Now and Then.

The two acts have crossed paths before. O.A.R. are featured on “Hiding on the Moon,” a single off Wong’s 2023 album, The Lucky One. In a press release announcing that single, Wong touched on his deep history with his collaborators: “I’ve been a fan of O.A.R. since I was a teenager. I have seen them play several times, and when I finally got the chance to hang with Marc and the guys, I knew we’d hit it off musically. I had some time off in New York and Marc invited me to come hang and write in his studio. I had a loop of an idea that I had been sitting on for a while that I shared with him and he said, ‘Let me get a microphone up.’ We wrote the song that afternoon, and I took the tracks and ran with it over the next couple of months.  I wanted to add some unique guitar elements to it, so I decided to use some natural harmonics as the opening section, and for the guitar solo, I wanted to channel a combination of…Coldplay/Allman/Mayer. This song ended up being a great collaboration that really features both Cory Wong and O.A.R. in a unique way and really shows the power of creative minds coming together to make something that we wouldn’t have made independently!”

O.A.R. frontman Marc Roberge tacked on his own sentiments, sharing: “I love the idea that we’ve each got exclusive access to our own imagination. It’s our private place where dreams build, and that’s what this song is about.”  

In 2023, Wong and O.A.R. shared the stage in Minneapolis during the A Crazy Game of Hockey charity event. The Vulfpeck guitarist, a major hockey enthusiast, brought the members of the group out for their collaborative single during his set and later emerged with O.A.R. for a cover of “Hard to Handle” that featured the benefit’s other participants.

O.A.R. will perform at Columbus, OH’s KEMBA Live! Outdoor on Thursday while Wong will appear at Raleigh, NC’s Hopscotch Music Festival, which will run from September 10-12.