By David Taylor / Managing Editor
A casual conversation on the golf course between friends turned into the birth of a deeper musical relationship. The Twenty Twos recently shared the stage with country music star Will Banister at the annual Crosby Fair and Rodeo, May 31, a welcome return to the stage in front of the home crowd.
They’re not a rifle, pistol, or a shotgun.
Hayden Eidson, spokesperson for the band and co-founder, laughed at the association.
“We get that a lot, but our name didn’t come from that,” he explained.
The formation of the group came when two friends, Eidson and Hayden Wyatt, were on the Crosby High School golf team and struck up a conversation on the course one day that changed the direction of their lives.
“We’ve been friends since we were in the same kindergarten class in Crosby and we’ve been best friends forever. We were golfing at practice one day and he happened to mention that he had a set of drums. I told him I played guitar. We just never, really knew that about each other,” he explained. Later, he asked him to come over and play their instruments and the fun became magical.
“My parents have a little carport at our house, and we played. He showed up around lunchtime and we learned four or five songs, playing them all through the night,” he said. They added another buddy from the golf team that really didn’t work out.
“He wanted to go another direction, but it was the three of us that started playing our first gig together,” he said.
They played for a function at the Newport Country Club, but before they went, they had to have a name.
“We were struggling with names and one of our moms, I believe it was Wyatt’s mom, said to call us the 22’s since we all graduated from high school in 2022,” he said.
They played that first gig and the name stuck, and they never changed it afterwards. They also got bit by the stage bug—wanting to be entertainers.
Both Hayden’s knew they had to continue to grow the band if they wanted to add more engagements to their bare calendar, so before the Newport date, they added another golf friend, Kagen Keltz as the bassist.
Fast forward a year or so and there was more expansion. For a year, it was only the three of them.
“It sounded fine, and we were having great fun, but we knew we just needed something a little different. Something like a little edge who could solo on either electric guitar or piano,” Eidson said.
Eidson and Wyatt had some Christmas gift cards burning a hole in their pockets and a quick trip turned into a two-hour encounter.
They met a keyboard player named Ethan Rodriguez and invited him to come and play with them.
“We thought he played just piano, because that’s what he was playing at the Guitar Center. Once we brought him to practice, he brought in the piano, an electric guitar, and a microphone to do harmonies! We were blown away,” Eidson said.
They recently brought in Eidson’s younger brother, Harlen, to stroke the keys and the five-piece band feels complete.
Earning places to play has been a challenge.
“The Crosby music scene has a lot of older guys that kind of hit the bar scene, and it’s a pretty tight knit group, but we wanted to do something a little different. The bar scene isn’t really something we were intrigued by. We wanted kind of a good old boy mentality and being as young as we were, we had to be professional to be taken seriously,” he said.
They called around to local restaurants, wedding venues, and sought out other options.
“Being as young as we were, it was very hard to get into certain spots and be taken seriously,” he said. But both best friends were raised to be polite, didn’t take any money upfront, and worked with a gentleman’s mentality to earn their way into the good graces of local businesses and fans.
As the band expanded, so did the repertoire.
“We play predominantly Texas country music, from Hank Williams, Jr. to Merle Haggard, to Don Williams and then some of the older stuff,” he said. They’ve begun incorporating Taylor Childers, Zach Brian, and Parker McCollum cover music along with their own compositions.
They have just finished their third album at Dark Side Studios in Louisiana.
From the carport, their first show in Wyatt’s driveway in Newport to a gig on the biggest stage in Crosby at the Crosby Fair and Rodeo, The Twenty Twos hope their trajectory continues to soar like their love for performing.
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