Kevin Bronson on March 25th, 2021

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Meet Awesome Easy. Which rhymes with Austin Eastlee. Who, after years away from making music, is back.

Eastlee’s story is a long, strange trip, though not the same kind he describes in the first Awesome Easy single, “Grapefruit Blvd.” For those unfamiliar with desert geography, Grapefruit Blvd. is the name of California State Route 111, the artery through the Coachella Valley that heads down to the Salton Sea. As for the song, it’s pure slacker gold, as Eastlee, armed with a bag of mushrooms and behind the wheel of a Mustang convertible, goes road-trippin’.

“It’s about driving around the desert on psychedelics and being struck by the incredible kindness of strangers you meet along the way,” he says. “It’s a bit of a cliche in L.A., but it can be fun to embrace those sometimes.”

The song, featuring Marko Kurtovic on guitar, was produced by Family of the Year’s Joe Keefe, who along with John Anderson (Girls) is co-producing Awesome Easy’s debut album.

“Grapefruit Blvd” is one of a trove of songs Eastlee has been hoarding ever since he walked away from music in 2013. He had fronted the indie band AV Club, whose members included his cousin, Sean Guerin (now of De Lux), and even tried to get a label off the ground. (Refresher course on AV Club: Here and here.)

“I basically quit pursuing music and concentrated on just bartending full time and taking that more seriously as a craft,” he says. “It was pretty unnatural for me, because I don’t really buy into that pretentious mixology thing, but it was something I could be creative with as well as use to cultivate some much-needed discipline.”

He spent a year in France (he has dual citizenship) before returning to the U.S., going back to school, studying theater and trying his hand at visual arts in design and animation. “After all this fucking around I turned 30 and realized I could do whatever the fuck I wanted and all my searching and worrying about purpose didn’t matter and that I should have just been making music this whole time,” Eastlee says. Through a couple of his bartending jobs, he met other musicians, which led to linking up with Keefe.

“It made me appreciate the scene that I took for granted 10 years ago,” Eastlee says.

Awesome Easy has some 30 recordings in the works — and Eastlee warns to expect the unexpected, stylistically. “It’s probably gonna be a bit all over the place,” he says, “but I think calling the project Awesome Easy is a way to get away with that and have some wiggle room.”

||| Stream: “Grapefruit Blvd”