Dave Koscelny is the Al Jardine of country up-and-comers 2SB, in that he is the only member of the Oklahoma-based quartet (the band hails from the tiny town of Lenapah) who, technically speaking, is not part of the family.
Whereas Jardine in The Beach Boys had to contend with not being related to the Wilson brothers (Brian, Carl and Dennis) and their cousin Mike Love, Koscelny is the “one odd out” in this particular outfit, as Kyle, Jake and Wes Lowrey, who make up the rest of 2SB, are all brothers.
“They argue a lot, of course!” laughs Dave, who, along with the others, still lives in Oklahoma, when asked if this has ever caused friction between them. “Actually, when the band first started it was two of the brothers, Jake and Kyle, and then me and another kid that wasn’t a brother. He was the bass player.
“When he quit, they brought Wes in – and there are other brothers, so I can be replaced! Sometimes they argue, but they treat me like I’m just as much a part of it as everyone else. We get along really good.”
The new EP, recorded at The Tracking Room in Nashville, came out on June 16 and features two tracks from outside writers, one of which is the excellent “Boombox” (penned by Nashville stalwarts Gordie Sampson and Brett Beavers) and two originals, “Country Girl Swag” and “Revolve.”
Recalls Dave, “The guy that produced the album, Fred Mollin, he listened to some of our songs, picked two, and then we went out and listened to probably 100 songs from outside writers and picked two of those, ‘Alone Tonight‘ and ‘Boombox.'”
How do the boys normally write their songs?
“Usually Kyle, our lead singer, starts them, brings them to us and we all try and work on them as a band. Sometimes that goes well and sometimes it doesn’t! It’s usually how we know whether it’s gonna be a song or not; we know by how the rest of the band reacts and how smooth everything goes…”
2SB’s style could best be described, I think, as “pop country” – although they did start out playing Red Dirt, a style of country particularly popular in their home state – and as the group consists of four young males, the phrase “boy band” has unsurprisingly been used to describe them.
Although the biography on their official website states that they dislike the term, I discovered that Dave, the oldest member of the band at 27, wasn’t too concerned about it, nor was he that bothered about the inevitable comparisons with the genre’s most famous boy band, Rascal Flatts.
“Yeah, we’ve definitely heard that before,” he admits. “I don’t mind the term as much because there’s not really anything in country music like that right now…
“We do really well with a younger crowd and with Taylor Swift and Hunter Hayes, etc., country music has that. I think we’d do well as the ‘country One Direction,’ or whatever! Those guys are really successful so we’ll take it!”
Dave met the Lowrey brothers when they were all at high school together and 2SB have existed as a fully-functioning unit now for 10 years. In 2011 they had a hit on Texas Regional Radio with “Off Romancin'” and great things are expected of them in the months and years to come.
On the subject of a new full-length LP, which will probably be made up of 10 tracks (“It seems like all the great albums are around 10 songs!”), including the four on the EP, Dave states, “We’re actually working on the album…
“We were in the studio a week ago working on the forth track. We got three more done and we’re working on the forth one right now. We’ll hopefully get an album out pretty quick, hopefully by the end of the year.”
2SB’s EP can be purchased from iTunes.
For more information on this soon-to-be-huge new country act, visit their official website.
