ECHO + Tyler Lee Frush Band | LOCAL ORIGINAL MUSIC!

There are bands that play songs, and then there are bands that take a perfectly respectable song, invite it down a dark alley, buy it a drink, and see what happens.

ECHO is the latter.

Born somewhere between the dusty roads of Americana, the back porches of folk and country, the crooked streets of the blues, and the louder neighborhoods of rock & roll, ECHO is a jam band with one foot planted firmly in the song and the other liable to wander off somewhere entirely unexpected.

The whole business began with Greg Shaddix and the Back Row Baptists, Illegal Smile: The Songs of John Prine, and Tangled Up in Blue: The Songs of Bob Dylan. Eventually, these various musical roads collided, as roads are occasionally inclined to do, and ECHO came stumbling out of the wreckage carrying guitars.

At the helm is Greg Shaddix, with Roger Brainard, Jerbo Foti, Chris Nosek, and Mark Grundhoefer alongside him. Together, they believe a song is not necessarily finished simply because somebody has written the last chord on a piece of paper.

ECHO plays original music alongside the timeless songs of writers like John Prine and Bob Dylan, but the real trouble begins when the band starts listening to one another. A melody wanders. A guitar answers. The rhythm section decides nobody is in charge anymore. Ten minutes later, everyone is somewhere they did not intend to be, and somehow the song has become better for it.

ECHO is a band where the songs are the map, the jam is the road, and nobody is entirely certain where the road ends.

There are young musicians, there are old musicians, and then there are the ones who seem to have arrived on Earth already knowing where the one chord everybody else forgot is hiding.

The Tyler Lee Frush Band falls somewhere in that last category.

Led by guitarist and songwriter Tyler Lee Frush, the band brings together the grit of Southern rock, the soul of blues, the storytelling of Americana, and the restless spirit of a good old-fashioned rock & roll band. Their music has plenty of swagger, but it isn’t interested in standing still for long.

Tyler has the kind of approach to music that makes you suspect he would rather find out what happens when the amplifier gets turned up than read the instructions on the back of it. Backed by a tight, energetic band, he delivers songs with equal parts musicianship, attitude, and heart.

The Tyler Lee Frush Band is the sort of band that reminds you why people started plugging guitars into amplifiers in the first place: write a good song, turn it up, play it like you mean it, and leave a little room for something unexpected to happen.