Best of What's Next: Other Lives

Hometown: Stillwater, Okla.
Album: Other Lives
Band Members: Jenny Hsu (cello, piano), Jonathon Mooney (piano, violin, guitar), Josh Onstott (bass, organ), Colby Owens (drums), Jesse Tabish (piano, guitar, lead vocals)
For Fans Of: Shearwater, Great Lake Swimmers, Dawes

Listening to the first few seconds of Other Lives’ self-titled debut, you might think you mistakenly popped in your grandma’s favorite classical music compilation. “E Minor,” the album’s first track, plays with all the delicate, swooning beauty of “Moonlight Sonata.” But this is hardly a band of Beethovens: The Oklahomans have shared the stage with Bat For Lashes and The Decemberists, had songs featured on Grey’s Anatomy and Ugly Betty and stirred up crowds at festivals from SXSW and Sasquatch to Lollapalooza.

Still, Other Lives’ softspoken frontman, Jesse Tabish, doesn’t measure his band’s success in these common terms. “Whatever comes of any of this is a side note to what I want to do,” he says. “I want the band to be successful, of course, but I’d go crazy trying to plot and plan ways to do that. I’ll take whatever comes.”

Even if Tabish was into plotting and planning, he wouldn’t have to do much—the band’s music speaks volumes on its own. Like Coldplay’s Parachutes minus the smash single, Other Lives waltzes elegantly through ethereal, gorgeous melodies atop soft beds of piano and acoustic guitar, Chris Martin’s boyish wonder replaced by Tabish’s haunted melancholy. That voice, its lost-soul crackle like a human cello, was more surprising to Tabish than anyone. “In high school I was in a punk band—it was playing piano later that mellowed my voice out,” he says. “That instrument geared me to a certain tone.”

Initially started up by “a few buddies who were really into Godspeed! You Black Emperor,” Tabish remembers, the first incarnation of Other Lives was a piano, cello and drum trio dubbed Kunek, which played long, classical-influenced and often instrumental compositions. As more musicians joined, the songs got shorter; in 2008, Kunek became Other Lives.

Tabish, now 26, has grown along with his evolving music, “not necessarily in magical, brilliant, shining moments,” he says, “but through writing for hours and hours everyday.” And he’ll do whatever’s necessary to keep those hours, even staying rooted in the small town of Stillwater—where he teaches guitar lessons on Saturdays—because “living cheap means more time.” Other Lives’ debut has only been out for only eight months, but after a year full of touring, Tabish is already prepping his next album because, well, he has to. “Honestly, for me music is a sense of purpose,” he says. “It’s a job in the best sense of the word. A necessity that I do everyday.”