Best Underage Band: 11Echo
11Echo lead singer Kira Levin’s secret to her band’s success is simple. They get their audience.
“We connect, we’re engaging with them and playing songs that everyone can sing along to,” she said. “It’s just fun to get into it.”
It’s heads-up thinking from a 15-year-old Mira Costa student, but she and her bandmates are no strangers to self-aware musical thought.
“I really pride myself on how much I know about what’s going on,” keyboardist and UCLA student Cole Riddle said, rattling off a treatise about jazz great Herbie Hancock’s catalog.
Together, Riddle, Levin, drummer Justin Lin, bassist Max Rohde and guitarist Noah Viklund are the first underage band to play at Fiesta Hermosa, covering popular rock tunes spanning the decades.
The downside to being an underage band is, as members grow older and move on (Viklund is heading to Boston’s Berklee School of Music; Lin attends the Orange County School of Arts in Santa Ana), it’s increasingly difficult to perform shows.
“We’ll continue to gig when everyone is together, though,” Levin said. “We’ve all got breaks together, so we’ll do whatever we can to keep playing even though we’re apart.”
11echomusic.com
