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APPEARING LIVE
Friday, Oct. 2nd at 10:00 pm
The Eli Young Band’s music has all the hallmarks of youth: passion, energy, excitement. The band’s story is the definition of commitment: eight-years—eight long years—spent honing its sound while building to the release of its first national album.
The blend of sonic exuberance and personal maturity is just one of the things that makes the Eli Young Band and their Universal Republic/Universal Records South debut, Jet Black & Jealous, such an intriguing musical property.
The band combined a range of elements—vocalist Mike Eli’s ingratiating resonance, guitarist James Young’s elastic bag of sounds, bass player Jon Jones’ inventive foundation and drummer Chris Thompson’s energetic propulsion—to create a 12-song CD that paints even the difficult turns in life with an underlying optimism.
"That’s been a theme through a lot of our music," Jones observes. "It might be raining today, but it might be sunny tomorrow, so it’s worth sticking around for."
Sticking around is a major tenet of the Eli Young Band. The eight years of lugging equipment to small Texas clubs, of losing day jobs because their music held priority, of saying goodbye to relationships torn by their weekend travels, only solidified their dedication.
The four weren’t sure initially what they had or where they were bound. But they knew they needed to keep pushing forward, that there was something special in their boundless mix of modern country and solid roots-rock inspirations.
Their persistence led to new career plateaus. The band was embraced early on by CMT (Country Music Television), GAC (Great American Country), Country Weekly, Guitar One and Billboard. After their video for single "When It Rains" was picked up on both country music channels, fans across the country poured into venues night after night and would sing the words back to the band.
The buzz around the band and their independent single caused a stir among concerts promoters and radio programmers who began to add their single to play lists from Denver to Kansas City and Chicago. The single was soon working its way up the Billboard Hot Country Singles Chart. While being worked independently to radio, the song spent more than 30 weeks on the chart, an amazing feat considering the band had not yet signed with a major label. Now, with the manpower of Universal Republic and Universal Records South behind the band, their single is well on its way to becoming the longest running single in chart history.
"We live in the American Idol age, the age of instant celebrity," Young notes. "But we grew up listening to bands that did the same thing we eventually did. That was all we knew: Go out and start playing." Eli adds, "we can stand up with our heads held high because we have a history and we’ve gone out there for eight years and worked really hard. Everything that we’ve done so far, we’ve built ourselves. I think there’s something to be said for that, being able to have our story and being able to have a history as a band." The history is important, but so is the current sound of Jet Black & Jealous. Produced by Mike Wrucke and Frank Liddell, who jointly oversaw Miranda Lambert’s award-winning Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, the disc draws eight of its 12 songs from songwriters Eli and Young, who inevitably fashioned their material around characters with distinct determination. The on-the-run guy in "Throw And Go," the emotionally torn woman in "Guinevere," and the at-a-crossroads protagonist of "Mystery In The Making" all have their focus on the future, even when they’re uncertain what that future will be.
Those attitudes distinctly mirror the real-life philosophies of the EYB, who infuse Jet Black & Jealous with sonic backdrops cherry picked from such disparate sources from Rodney Crowell, to the Eagles, to Foster & Lloyd.
