Marty O'Reilly and The Old Soul Orchestra

Explaining Marty O'Reilly & the Old Soul Orchestra's music is like describing a dream. It
feels familiar, but at the same time unchartered. The songs sound bluesy but not blues, folk
but not folk, soulful but not soul. Marty's voice is beautiful and unique, his lyrics stark yet
lush over gritty electrified guitar. Chris Lynch's violin, Matt Goff's percussion and Ben
Berry's rich bass meld beautifully into genre-defying music within the vast definitions of
Americana. The chemistry of these friends is obvious. But one can also hear an urgency
and complexity in the songs, expressing something elemental and perhaps contradictory:
love and anger, joy and pain, real and imagined.

The live performance is at the core of this Bay-Area based project: the band enters a trance
and the music is born again as something new every night. It's what their followers call
"magic". They go from raw gospel blues to cinematic epics, from heavy driving grooves to
delicately arranged folk songs. They leave the stage out of breath and sweaty, the ground
littered with broken strings and bow hairs. It's hard to describe, impossible to categorize.
Yet people who know the music will try to explain it to you, just as you might struggle to
explain a dream in the morning. The details might slip away as you recount them, but the
feeling remains.