Eli Young Band Preps Single, EP and Album For 2011 Releases

The Eli Young Band is shipping the sweet ballad “Crazy Girl,” the lead-off single from their forthcoming album, to radio Monday. The group — Mike Eli, guitarist James Young, drummer Chris Thompson and bassist Jon Jones — will release the as-yet-untitled new album in the summer. But they plan to tease it by dropping an April EP featuring a few new songs.

In a conversation with The Oklahoman, the band talked about the new single and new upcoming projects:

“We’ve been touring on the last record, Jet Black & Jealous, for the last few years, so it’s kind of nice to get to the point where we’re releasing this next record. We’ve been working on it for awhile so there’s been a lot of buildup,” said singer/guitarist Mike Eli, 29, in a phone interview earlier this week from the road in Charleston, S.C.

“We’re pretty positive, and our music is pretty positive. But I think this album really has even more depth than we’ve had in the past. I think it’s going to be really cool to hear and see everybody’s reaction to kind of some of the new things we’re trying. We don’t ever want to stop trying new things.”

“Everything is baby steps really. I mean, we’ve been a band for 10 years, and with Jet Black & Jealous, that was kind of the evolution between being the independent band to being able to branch out and play all over the U.S. And so this next record is hopefully the next step of continuing to build everywhere. You know, there’s still a lot of people out there who don’t know who we are and don’t know our music,” Eli said.

“So we just tried to make sure that we put the best songs on the record and made sure that it was honest and spoke of what we’re going through in our lives. We try to make records that they’re not just a bunch of songs that we just clump together. We want them to have a story and we want them to be real.”

An acoustic performance of the new single "Crazy Girl" is below.