Tyler Bryant's story is the stuff of Hollywood screenplays. The 24-year-old from Honey Grove, TX, started playing guitar when he was just six years old and by the time he was old enough to drive Bryant had formed the Tyler Bryant Band, toured internationally and was invited by Eric Clapton to perform at the Crossroads Guitar Festival in Chicago. However, Bryant's true turning point was when he moved to Tennessee shortly afterward and met drummer Caleb Crosby, who helped him put together Tyler Bryant & The Shakedown alongside bassist Noah Denney and guitarist Graham Whitford (the latter of whom's father plays in another obscure band called Aerosmith).

Bryant is recounting his story over a warm chicken salad at an upscale eatery in Midtown where the foursome look slightly out of place with their long hair and jingling jewelry among a sea of businessmen. Then again, Bryant is used to being an outcast. "When I was 17, I decided I was done with high school and left my friends and family in Texas and got an apartment in Nashville," he recounts. "When I first met Caleb, I just wanted to hang out and have a friend," he admits. "It was my first time in a big city, so it was a bit intimidating." Nashville may not seem like a big town to Bryant these days but at the time it was massive. "I come from a town of 1,700 people," he explains, glancing around the restaurant. "The first couple of times I came to New York, it made me physically sick because I was not used to being in a city. I was constantly claustrophobic."

While Bryant was originally raised playing blues in the vein of artists like John Lee Hooker and Johnny Hopkins, he had a huge turning point when he saw the Black Crowes and realized that rock n' roll "was just the blues music I was into but with longer hair and more distortion.” From there, he got into artists like Tom Petty and Led Zeppelin, who turned out to also be the perfect catalyst for forming his own band with Crosby seven years ago. "I went from playing with a bunch of old blues guys to playing with guys my own age, and it's just a totally different dynamic," he admits. "With these guys every day is like a party; it's really fun and it's what I've always wanted in the sense that it's a group of guys that are like brothers, and we just travel the world together and play rock n' roll. It all just made sense as soon as we started playing together."

That connection is evident on the band's new six-song EP The Wayside, which showcases the band's love of blues and rock—although completing it was anything but easy. "Oh man, it's been a long process of making this EP," Crosby says, adding that the group spent years in their basement studio writing and rejecting songs that they didn't think captured their current sound. Eventually the group enlisted producer Vance Powell (Jack White) who also produced their 2013 full-length Wild Child and helped the band realize their vision. "We've worked with so many producers but always felt a special connection with Vance because he has a clear vision and is very opinionated instead of just being a yes man," Bryant explains. "We play rock n' roll; it's not rocket science, but there's a certain energy I feel like you lose when you separate all the core elements so Vance really forced us to lean on our group dynamic."

Correspondingly, the band recorded The Wayside EP live…even if it tested the limits of their sanity. "There were times we would nail a song in three or four takes and then there was one song we tried like 30 times and still didn't get it," Bryant says with a sigh. "We went home feeling like the worst musicians of all-time because we weren't getting the vibe and came back the next day and did it 10 more times. It's a lot of work to do it that way, but it made us so much better and whenever we go out and perform now it really shows." The band proved this on their recent run with the Sheepdogs, and you can witness the power of their performances for the next few months as they support ZZ Top guitarist Billy Gibbons' solo tour. "We're not a sterile and stale studio band and we really had to embrace our live sound in order to create songs that we really felt reflected who we are as a unit," Crosby adds.

The EP may take influence from the past, but it's also remarkably relevant and diverse, ranging from the fuzzed-out groove of "Loaded Dice & Buried Money" to the slide-guitar driven twang of "Last One Leaving" or laid-back soul of the title track. "We recorded 13 songs for the EP and were able to pull the six strongest tracks while still keeping it really eclectic," Bryant admits. "If you go from 'Loaded Dice' to 'The Wayside,' you're at opposite ends of the spectrums but I feel like it all sounds like us and hopefully takes you on a journey." Suddenly Denney looks up from his burger and injects his own analogy. "If you go see a movie you don't want to see one that's action the whole time," he explains. "We didn't want to make a Mission Impossible record, we wanted to make it more like James Bond. You've got plenty of action but you've also got some love scenes in there to break things up."

Hearing this, his bandmates begin laughing and complimenting him on the apt comparison. Bryant may have shared the stage with people like Jeff Beck and Aerosmith, but there's a youthful energy inherent in Tyler Bryant & The Shakedown that's evident on the EP and is clearly something that will continue to push them forward as they embark on the second half of their 20s. "We just wanted to make something fresh that we had never heard before because that's what's exciting to us as musicians," Bryant summarizes. "We never thought about writing a single because that's just not our mentality as a band. It's more like, 'Let's make something really cool that will be like a party whenever we play live. Let's not overanalyze things, let's just plug in our instruments and have some fun."