With twangy guitar riffs, twelve-bar piano blues and soaring pedal steel notes, Hello Walls is breaking into the Bloomington, Ind. music scene with a folk rock Americana  sound.

Front man Tim George, bassist Todd Rush and lead guitarist Tyler Polk have been playing music together for the last few years and began crafting their writing style in The Idle Flatlands Riverband. But after meeting drummer Joe Faessler and keyboardist Joe Durm nearly six months ago, they found the missing pieces to the sound they had long been seeking. Hello Walls was formed and so too was their style. As they like to call it, “beer-doused, folk-rocking, deep fried Americana.”

Joe and Jed found the group after responding to a post on Craigslist. The band had put up the ad in hopes of finding percussion and keys. As fate would have it, they got exactly what they were looking for.

“They had posted a whole bunch of bands that I listen to and had grown up listening to, but I didn’t really have a lot of expectations,” Joe said. Yet with similar musical interests and a common vision for folk rock the band began to play frequently and found that the dynamic had potential. “After hanging out with them we found we got along pretty well, pretty quickly and all of the pieces kind of fell in to place.”

“It’s a real treat for me because we never had a keyboard player before until now,” Todd Rush said, adding he also is impressed by Jed’s percussion. “It’s really nice to hear the music how we had it envisioned before, it is really good to see that happen.”

With a few live shows now under their belt, a set lineup and new songs coming together, the newly formed band hopes this is the beginning of a successful career together. Todd said that each member has eyes set on the future and feels excited about the direction of the band. “I don’t want to put a definitive goal on the future, but we want to take it as far as we can.”

Hello Walls is finding that coordinating schedules and formulating a plan takes a lot of hard work, Tim George said. There is even talk of the band relocating to Nashville, Tenn. But for now the next step, as Tyler Polk explained, is to continue making their presence felt around Bloomington’s live music scene and to begin recording their first album.

How they record their songs is still up in the air.

“ I don’t know whether or not we are going to go for the live sound like Neil Young does with one recording and one take without tinkering with it too much, or if we are going to go for sheer perfection,” Tyler said. But added that either way, the process will begin in the near future.

“I’d like to see us start touring around the country,” he added. “We have all of the intentions to be productive.”

By: Daniel Brown

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