College Station native Owen Tiner thinks Aggieland contains its share of rough crowds.
“They can be tough, but once you grab them, they are kind to you,” said Tiner, lead vocalist and guitar player for alternative country band One Light Town. “Once you have a core group of fans you’re set.”
He said it has taken One Light Town three years to get its group of fans, but now when the band plays in College Station, it often sees the same faces in the crowd.
Brady Weatherly, a freshman biomedical sciences major, is one such fan of One Light Town.
“They have a good sound as a whole, and with two lead singers, it keeps them sounding new,” he said. “All their songs don’t sound the same. It’s upbeat Texas country, and that’s what we need around here.”
Weatherly said he bought One Light Town’s CD after seeing one of their live performances.
“I saw Owen Tiner play with Django Walker and liked Tiner’s stuff,” he said. “I bought the band’s CD, and it sounds good.”
While the band boasts a dedicated fan base today, One Light Town’s humble roots were set in the fall of 2000 when Tiner and Greg Schroeder, guitarist, joined up and started performing two-man acoustic sets in and around College Station.
The duo soon landed a weekly gig at the Crooked Path Ale House.
It was there that Tiner and Schroeder met the friends who would soon constitute the rest of their band: Brandon Alcala, Matt Newton, and Cory “The Spider” Knick were already members of rock band “Imaginary Friend” when they decided to join One Light Town. The group wanted to create a band that, as Tiner explained, had “influences all over the map.”
Tiner describes his band’s music as “alternative country with an Americana influence.” Members of the band have backgrounds ranging from almost every kind of rock.
“We have a punk bass player, heavy metal guitarist and classic rock influences,” Tiner said.
Though they are often thrown into the growing Texas music scene, Tiner said the label is misleading.
“Bars and groups often throw us in (to that category), but we’re not like most of it,” Tiner said. He said the band’s influences range from Ryan Adams to Tom Petty.
With the formation of the final line-up of the band, One Light Town quickly garnered a crowd that was too big for Crooked Path to accomodate.
The band began branching out, playing in surrounding cities such as Houston, Dallas, Fort Worth, Lubbock, New Braunfels and Oklahoma City.
Two weeks after the band reached its final roster, it recorded a self-titled CD.
“From then on, we hit it as hard as we could,” Tiner said. “We got ourselves a booking agent and our crowd kept on growing,” Chris Stark has been One Light Town’s agent for two years now.
“I saw them in concert and approached them,” he said. “I became friends with the band and soon became their agent. In concert, they’re live and energetic. They have one of the largest fan bases in College Station,” Stark said.
With a released CD hailed as the “Featured CD of the Month” at TexasMusicMovement.com and a fan base growing larger with each show, One Light Town is one band that does not plan to take a break.
The band will be touring long into the spring.
One Light Town returns to its roots when Tiner and Schroeder play a two-man acoustic set at Hole In The Wall Saloon at 9 p.m. on Thusday, Jan. 29.
“We’ll probally do a large number of originals mixed with some covers that may or may not be recognizable,” he said. “Fans of the music will enjoy a nice change in pace with an acoustic set and new listeners will have a great introduction.”
The entire band will perform at Fitzwilly’s at 11p.m. on Friday, Jan. 30.