Eli Young Band Ready To “Turn It On” With New EP and Single

"It also brings us back to our roots too, when we were playing around in Texas and you had new music and wanted to get it out as soon as you can." - Guitarist James Young on releasing the EP the same week as the single hits radio.

With the music business in a constant state of change, Eli Young Band is pulling a move that usually happens with younger, lesser-known bands: They’re releasing the Turn It On EP in tandem with the new “Turn It On” single. In this exclusive interview, Eli Young Band (Mike Eli, James Young, Chris Thompson, Jon Jones), talks about their new single “Turn It On,” the growing changes of the industry, working with a new production team and the decisions behind releasing the EP instead of taking the standard path of relaxing a single and issuing a full-length album a few months later once the single is a big hit.

Roughstock: How was it like for you to take a new chance vocally?

Mike Eli: If you listen to all of our records, we take a lot of chances with our records and with [“Turn It On,”] specifically, it was something very different. And that kinda developed in the songwriting session. Rodney Clawson kind of has a dynamic in his vocal that I didn’t want to lose. So it was a melding of the way he and I sang it. It’s a little bit different to sing live and we had rehearsals with the new stuff from the EP and it takes a little bit to get used to. But it’s fun to play live and and to sing.

Roughstock: Yeah, it uses the faster style, repeating words than maybe others are used to…

Mike Eli: Yeah, it definitely doesn’t allow to have time to think between lines, that’s for sure.

Roughstock: How did you choose to work with new producers?

Mike: The new producers kind of changed organically because we were writing with both of them (Jeremy Stover and Ross Copperman), songs that ended up on this EP and [what comes] next. It happened naturally because we started working on demos together and some of the recordings of this album were recorded on the tourbus as we wrote them. We decided to do this right with those songs, those guys could help us produce these demos which eventually turned into the EP.

Roughstock: I know Brett Eldridge said that about working with Ross. Also having the raw emotion of feeling the new song, to capture that emotion later on.

Mike: Sometimes to recapture the magic again can be difficult and even though I did go in and record some of these vocals again, we found ourself going back to the original bus vocals quite a bit, which probably made it tougher for the mixing engineers with the roar of the bus generators in the background (laughs).

Roughstock: It’s happening more and more…

Jon Jones: You say that but it’s really the first time we’ve had the chance to record an album this way. Jeremy and Ross are balls of energy in the studio and that’s how records are made this way.

Roughstock: And with Ross, he’s an artist too — well, all songwriters are on some level but he is or has been an artist…

James Young: And he’s young too, which is great. In the studio this time, the way they worked is that you didn’t overthink things. If it sounded great, we moved on. And what Mike was alluding to, there was references back to the demos because sometimes you get it right the first time, even when writing it. And we’d try to go back and try to recreate those sounds we had on this project.

Roughstock: And that’s something that stood out to Dierks Bentley too on his “Riser” project.

James: It was fun. It’s going to be fun with positive good vibes. He brings all those intangibles to the table that makes it fun to record…

Mike: Jeremy kept us on track too. With us being a bunch of spacey band guys and ross the ’spacey’ producer guy, he kept everything in order…

Roughstock: You’re doing something different with the EP as it hits stores this week, the same week the new single hits radio. It’s really a unique situation for a band, going against traditions…

Mike: The music industry is changing. Constantly. And we were at a point in our career where we could take some chances. We felt like this music was special and somewhat of a new musical direction for us. We’ve always felt like that with every record but more so with this one. We had an incredible amount of freedom to record this EP and when we delivered it to them, the label said “we wanna go, we really love these songs.” We wanna move from 10,000 Towns and release one of these songs. It was a little of a double edged sword a bit…

Jon: It was a double-edged sword because you lose that build-up and marketing behind it…

Roughstock: Well that could happen with a full-length record after it I guess…

Jon: Yeah, and so this is step is here and whatever the next step would be, it’s like do you wanna wait to put it out to radio and wait four months or whatever it is for your fans to have the album…

Roughstock: Right, sort of like the situation which is happening with Zac Brown Band, who will be on a second single when their next album comes out. Which is a great problem to have… (everyone laughs)

Chris Thompson: Yeah, and everything is so immediate these days so we thought why not put four songs out there. When fans to go to buy “Turn It On,” they’ll see there are three more songs too. It was almost a no-brainer. And it’s fun for us too that we’ll have four new songs for our fans to hear in our live shows too.

Roughstock: Yeah, and they don’t have to wait forever to get those songs and say “what is this? where can I get it?”

James: It also brings us back to our roots too, when we were playing around in Texas and you had new music and wanted to get it out as soon as you can. It was different then when you had to wait to press CDs and stuff but now if we were new acts, it’d all go up online. But that’s how we got started and now we’re gonna try it on this level…

Roughstock: Yeah, why not? I’ve always believed that why would you want to hold music back as an established artist. Especially with the digital distribution these days...

Mike: If you think about where the music industry was, EPs were standard…

Roughstock: Back in the day, people like Elton John produced two full records a year….

Jon: and they recorded them in one week too…

Roughstock: Maybe with this EP, you’ll put out a full record of 16 tracks or something later on…

Mike: And that’s what we’re waiting to see. If this EP thing works. If may work, it may not but we’re in the same place. We’ll go play shows.

You can purchase the Turn It On EP here.

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