Eggy

by

Summerfest

Eggy is proof that dreams of forming a successful band with your high school buddies can, indeed, come true. The Connecticut quartet began in 2016 and has emerged as a must-see act in the jam-band world.

Here’s the thing, though: Eggy’s music—particularly the songs on 2024’s Waiting Game—is loaded with pop-music references, tight arrangements and hooks galore that don’t sacrifice the looseness and improvisational freedom that define most jam bands. Eggy shakes and grooves its way through ten over-easy songs in less than 37 minutes.

The three-and-a-half-minute single “Laurel,” Waiting Game’s bouncy first track, is the perfect example of how the band balances its influences.

“We’re such fans of modern music,” guitarist and vocalist Jake Brownstein told Relix upon the album’s release last fall. “The stuff that we’re listening to in our own time is everything from Kacey Musgraves to Fruit Bats and Phoebe Bridgers. We’re always trying to be in tune with what records are being made now … We always say, ‘The input directly affects the output.’ So whatever you’re listening to is going to have some influence. We grew up listening to the Dead and Phish and fell in love with Little Feat and Crosby, Stills & Nash, so we’d seen a lot of those influences come out in our prior songs. But ‘Laurel’ was the first song where the vibe from all this more recent music was starting to surface.”

Blurring the contemporary and the classic is what makes Eggy run. This band can stretch things out, too, taking songs past the 25-minute mark in a live setting. And they do sound like Phish at times. That said, highlights from earlier gigs this year have included covers by Sheryl Crow (“Soak Up the Sun”) and Heart (“Barracuda”). Let’s see Phish do that!