Band turns life’s stories into songs

For the band OTIS, the road isn’t just for touring and performance. Between shows, in parking lots and back rooms, the band gathers stories from the people they meet, weaving them into a catalog shaped as much by lived experience as by musical influence.

Those moments have become the lifeblood of OTIS’s songwriting.

When the Kentuckybased quartet returns to Muscle Shoals this month for a performance at Champy’s Famous Fried Chicken, they’ll bring with them their collection of stories gathered from miles on the road.

“There’s always some guy at the end of the night telling this wild story,” said frontman Boone Froggett. “We don’t really care if it’s true or not. We still take inspiration from it.”

That openness to the unexpected is part of what gives OTIS its distinct voice. Their music, which blends blues, soul and Southern rock, is grounded in tradition but shaped by the present. It’s a sound that echoes their musical influences from bands like the Allman Brothers and Lynyrd Skynyrd, while simultaneously carving our something uniquely their own.

All four members — Froggett, John Seeley, Alex Wells and Dale Myers — hail from Kentucky, where the band first came together in 2009. At the time, Froggett and Seeley were teenagers, playing in cover bands and searching for something more personal.

“We were just wanting to play music for the joy of creating something,” Froggett said. “The band was born from thinking outside the box. It’s like, you know, you start out playing cover music, and you’re expected to play songs a certain way. Over time, it just gets monotonous. You’re looking for a way to do your own thing.”

That desire led to a slow, yet deliberate build. OTIS spent years refining its lineup before releasing its first album, “Tough Times: Tribute to John Brim,” in 2015.

“We spent a lot of time making sure we had the right people in the band. We kind of gave ourselves our own artist development,” Froggett said. “We knew we were different. Around that time, being a new-age Southern Rock band really wasn’t a thing yet.”

Though their music draws heavily from Southern rock tradition, OTIS’s influences run deeper — down to the roots of American blues. For Froggett, that connection began at home.

His grandfather was a championship-winning bluegrass fiddler, and his father a honky-tonk guitarist, filling his early years with music from Bill Monroe, Merle Haggard and Buck Owens.

It was a chance discovery that set everything in motion.

“I was going through my dad’s cassette tape collection, and I came across B.B. King and The Fabulous Thunderbirds,” Froggett recalled. “As soon as I heard B.B. King play the first note, that set me on a path. I’m like, ‘This is what I want to do. If I could just play that one note like B.B., that’s where I want to be.’” As teen musicians chasing a decades-old sound in the early 2000s, Froggett and Seeley found themselves swimming against the current of mainstream music.

“It took us a while to convince people,” Froggett said. “People were trying to steer us in other directions, but we were like, ‘No, we don’t do that. This is what we do.’ It’s paid off over time. You have to be who you are and not be swayed by the flavor of the week.”

That stubborn commitment became a defining trait. Rather than chase trends, OTIS doubled down on its influences, and in some ways, started a trend for younger audiences who are just discovering the early sounds of some of their favorite artists.

“That’s kind of how we learned about those blues guys in the first place,” Froggett said. “If you look at the Allman Brothers’ debut album or Led Zeppelin’s debut album, and you go through who wrote the songs, it’s all original blues guys. It’s T-Bone Walker, Willie Dixon, Muddy Waters.

“I think people our age probably listened to the blues backwards,” he continued. “Like, we heard Stevie Ray Vaughan and The Fabulous Thunderbirds first, and then we worked back to John Mayall, Clapton and Cream, and all the British stuff that was going on back in the 1960s. Then we trace it back to the original blues guys in America in the 1950s. Then you keep going back and keep going back until you get to Robert Johnson and Son House and those guys.”

That sense of discovery still drives OTIS’s creative process, but now, the source material often comes from the road.

Unlike many bands built around a single songwriter, OTIS writes collaboratively. A riff, a lyric or even a passing comment can spark something larger once all four members begin shaping it together.

“A lot of bands have one guy who writes everything,” Froggett said. “We don’t work that way. I might come in with an idea or something, and once the other guys get a hold of it, it turns into something much greater than anything I could have come up with on my own.”

Sometimes, those ideas come from the band’s own experiences. Other times, they’re borrowed from the people they meet along the way.

One such moment inspired their latest single, “I’m Wicked,” which made Classic Rock magazine’s Tracks of the Week and has surpassed 50,000 streams on Spotify since its release in February.

The song’s origin traces back to a funeral, where guitarist Alex Wells encountered a preacher who refused to shake his hand, telling him, “You’ve got that evil in you.”

“It’s funny because Alex is like the nicest guy you’ll ever meet,” Froggett said with a laugh. “But you know, he’s probably not the only long-haired rock-and-roll guy that this has happened to. It got me thinking, anytime someone calls you out, you tend to point it back to yourself, like ‘What did I do to make that happen?’” That blend of introspection and real-world storytelling has become a hallmark of OTIS’s songwriting just as cross-generational influences paved the way for the band’s sound.

Since the release of their second album, “Eyes of the Sun,” OTIS has gradually released two other singles along with “I’m Wicked” in anticipation of a third full-length album still in the works.

Still, Froggett measures success less by accolades and publishing milestones and more by the connections he makes with the band on the road.

“I think with any band, the people you play for is your ultimate motivation,” he said. “That’s the really cool thing about all this, and that’s the only way you get to do any of it. You only get to tour and perform if people come out and see you.”