Eugene Tyler Band:
Indie-bluegrass trio Eugene Tyler Band is, at their core, a road band, who've spent years cutting their teeth on the bluegrass festival circuit and clubs across the northeast. Their newest record, Low It Goes, captures the free-wheeling intensity of those live shows and showcases the cathartic, irreverent songwriting that has won them fans all over the country. As songwriter Eugene Gardner says, “You learn a lot about yourself as a band when you’re playing 3 hours a night, and it’s forced us to step up our game in a way that I’m really proud of.” Sharing stages with bands like Billy Strings, the Kitchen Dwellers, and A.J. Lee, ETB has carved out a unique voice in the bluegrass scene, with cutting, often humorous songs, and a fast & loose approach that calls back to influences like the Clash and Drive-By Truckers. Producing the album themselves, the band made a point to take the varied instrumentation of their live shows into the studio. “Writing on different instruments lets us explore different emotional ranges that we might not otherwise get to if we had to rely on the same lineup all the time.” That emotional range comes through on songs like ‘Golden Years’ and ‘Sit Down’, soaring to a wall of acoustic sound, the band barreling forward with abandon. The title track, ‘Low it Goes’, sees the band at their most pleading, telling a story of people who are lonely around their families, lonely around their friends, lonely with their lovers, and lonely out in the world. The album has its fair share of lighter moments, from the country-sounding ‘Cheap Beer’ to a fired-up take on Tom Petty’s ‘ Apartment Song’, balancing out the acerbic attack that permeates the rest of the album. Eugene Gardner (vocals/guitar/mandolin/tenor guitar), Danny Tyler (banjo/guitar) and Marc Jaffee (upright bass/vocals) all grew up within a few miles of each other in New York’s Hudson Valley, where they are currently based.