It starts with a guitar riff. Justin Faldyn plays lead, pulling rock and blues out of the strings. 

After a beat, comes the beat of the drums, snare and bass, and tom and cymbal, helmed by Brennan Collier and his matching drumstick tattoo.

In comes Aaron Cruse Arbaugh with acoustic vocals. And The Highway 6 Band starts their show.

These musicians perform in venues across Texas, but they’re spotted most often in College Station, where they’ve been based since forming Highway 6 a year and a half ago. 

“I met Brennan in class,” Faldyn said. “We met in economics class, and he knew a bass player, so we just started jamming and it kind of happened. Eventually we found Aaron.”

Faldyn hails from La Grange, home of ZZ Top, country and blues. His hometown, however, is just a happy coincidence — Faldyn only started playing guitar about five years ago.

“My cousin actually got me into playing guitar,” Faldyn said. “He got one for his birthday, and I had an old acoustic at the house. That’s the only reason I picked it up. It was hanging on the wall since I was little, but I only started because of my cousin.”

Collier grew up more punk and metal than country rock, but together he, Faldyn and their former bass player melded half a dozen genres into a band. There was just one issue: a name.

“We had our very first show,” Collier said. “It was me, Justin and Reed, and we were on our way to Guitar Center to get some strings for Justin and me some drumsticks or something like that. We didn’t have a name but we had a show in three hours. So we’re just driving down Highway 6, throwing out names.”

The newly-christened Highway 6 Band met Cruse Arbaugh after watching a video of him performing on social media, inviting him to fill the band’s gap for vocals.

“I’ve been involved with music for the majority of my life,” Cruse Arbaugh said. “I never really sang or really wrote songs. I would write instrumentals and stuff growing up, but I never really tried to put a pen to paper. I got to college and realized that if I wasn’t going to be involved in an organization or anything like that, then music would be a really good way to meet people. So I started doing that. I realized I actually had a little bit of a knack for writing and stuck with it.”

With a lineup now complete, the band had only five days to prepare for a show with their new singer. But that was no issue; the group had an instant connection.

“I’ve played in several bands,” Cruse Arbaugh said. “The one thing I realized when I hopped in with these guys is there’s not a whole lot of people that I’ve met or that we’ve jammed with — anybody we’ve tried to play with — that can just immediately jump into something. We’re just all on the same wavelength.”

All this wouldn’t mean much without the man behind the scenes: band manager Andrew “Andy” Burk. While Faldyn strums the strings, Burk pulls them. He contacts venues, books gigs and keeps the group in line. Cruse Arbaugh joked that Highway 6 hangs out more than they actually practice, so it’s up to Burk to move things along.

“I have to keep them in check a little bit, because obviously if I don’t get them to practice, it’s not going to happen,” Burk said. “Then it’s going to sound like crap, and then it’s going to make me look bad, so I have to do something sometimes. But they’re usually pretty good about being ready.”

Burk even helps pen the occasional song lyric during 2 a.m. writing sessions with Cruse Arbaugh. That’s how most of their songs come to be, with Cruse Arbaugh and Burk bringing words into practice, and Faldyn and Collier taking it from there. But that’s not always the case; their upcoming single “Man on the Run,” which debuts April 20, was less written into existence and more willed into it. It started, again, with a guitar riff.

“Justin grew up playing blues music,” Cruse Arbaugh said. “He’s fluent in blues. I wish I could play half the blues music he can. We’re playing at our old bass player’s house, practicing, getting ready for a show. His roommate is upstairs and he’s nailing in a picture in the wall. It’s dah dah dah dah. Justin’s sitting there [tapping his feet] and he’s like, ‘Oh, OK’ and he starts playing a blues riff to the guy hanging a picture on a wall.

“It was kind of a faster tempo, and Brennan started picking it up, and I was like, ‘Wait, hold on, this is actually a good idea,’” Cruse Arbaugh continued. “We just kept going and going, and just the blues riff that he played and the solos that he does and the energy he put into writing that first part of the song — it’s a song I’ll be jumping up on a bass drum for almost every single Saturday that I can.”

As promised, “Man on the Run” has been closing Highway 6’s shows since its inception. But the rest of their set list — much like their sound — is very fluid and “shapeshifts,” as Cruse Arbaugh put it.

“It kind of depends on who we’re playing for,” Collier said. “If we know, ‘Hey, it’s going to be a bit of an older crowd,’ then we throw in some older country songs. Then for frats or sororities, we’ll add some alternative.”

In fact, Highway 6’s set lists are so fluid that they wait until the last possible minute to write it down.

“Our favorite thing, and almost a game that we play at this point, is ‘What are we going to write the set list on?’” Cruse Arbaugh said. “It’s been on paper plates, a pizza box, napkins.”

Their goal is always to connect to the audience; a show rarely passes without Arbaugh joining the crowd, jumping onto drums and off of stages.

“I understand the anarchy of a mosh pit,” Cruse Arbaugh said. “I want to jump in. I want to get into it, not just being stuck on stage or not having interaction. I think that crowd work is so important.”

As for the future, Highway 6 knows one thing: music will be the center of it one way or another.

“If a music career doesn’t work out and we’re gonna be stuck in like some office job, we’d much rather develop and create our own sound company,” Cruse Arbaugh said. “We’ve talked about opening up a recording studio.”

The band’s laidback perspective influences everything in their lives, like why Collier has a tattoo of one of their album covers.

“Our artist actually did this one for me, for a bottle of Tito’s I believe,” Collier said. “It was a very fair trade.”

It’s all about what moments in music they’re able to make in the meantime. Faldyn said his defining night so far was performing with Ray Wylie Hubbard and swapping guitar solos with his son onstage. Burk’s “proud dad” moment as manager was when Highway 6 played with Whiskey Myers, a band they frequently cover.

“Whiskey Myers was probably up there, when we hooked up that show and got to just sit back there and talk to the guys,” Burk said. “They were complimenting all of them, saying how good they were for how little they’d been playing and how much we’d moved forward in that small amount of time. That meant a lot coming from big bands like that.”

For now, the group is just taking it a day at a time, having fun with the music and their fellow musicians. There’s no plans set in stone —

But that’s how Highway 6 always plays it, anyway.