"As the story goes, the harder life is, the more I think you turn to things like music and your passions,” said thirty year old Skye Downing of her blues roots.

Just before taking the stage for a recent gig at Trilogy Lounge in Boulder, Downing fluttered across the room and out the back door for a preshow breather while bandmates Adam Schalke, Bryan Wagstaff, Chris Crantz and Chris Misner stood at a bar table finishing up dinner. The instruments on stage vibrated with anticipation as an excited audience filled the room. Endlessly dancing and cheering, the current crowd seems similarly as devoted to The Skye Downing Band.

“The crowd response last night was excellent,” Schalke, the group’s lead guitarist, said of the most recent show at Trilogy.

Downing adds, “It’s unusual, you know, that we don’t have a really good group of friends standing up and shouting.”

Downing’s sultry blues presence unexpectedly pours from a bubbly blonde whose travels and soul searching left her with a diverse musical resume and a love for her childhood home of Boulder.

Entrenched in the local music community for years, Downing took some time away from the area before returning to Boulder to try to take her career to the next level. While Downing’s experience grew enormously during eight years of traveling, she missed the old school Boulder scene she left behind.

“We all went to everybody’s gigs and if you had a gig in the mountains your whole following would come up by bus and stay in the condo with you and party and, you know, it was just really tight-knit and really needed,” said Downing.

After several years performing in the Boulder scene, Downing moved to Dallas. Even though the change turned out to be “a nightmare,” Downing admitted life in Dallas is what sparked her passion for blues and jazz music.

“It gave me some personality. Maybe a little life experience,” she said.

In 1999, Downing shifted her roots to San Diego, where she experimented in two very different bands.

“I was really scared back then,” said Downing of Hot Water Music, a jazz trio she helped begin.

Method, a rap-core band suggestive of Evanescence, challenged Downing in a new genre.

“It was a great experience for me to bust my chops and sing in harder core music,” said Downing.

Eventually, Downing found herself back in Boulder starting up a new band.

“It’s fun to have a steady crew together and get better,” she said.

The five-piece band met through mutual friends and blues jams at The Catacombs, a bar in downtown Boulder.

“Musicians around here are very open and positive,” said twenty-five year old Schalke of local musicians.

Schalke grew up listening to his father’s blues band in a suburb of Chicago and was drawn to the genre at a very young age. Years later, his talent is far from being limited to blues music.

“My goal is to get to the point were I can sit in with pretty much any group and sit that style and play,” said Schalke.

Recently, Schalke broadened his horizons to include a pedal steel guitar that will hopefully make its debut with The Skye Downing Band soon.

“We’re really excited. We’re just like ‘we can’t wait!’” Downing said of Schalke’s newest goal.

Currently, the band is waiting until they have more original songs before making their first album. As of now, the only way to catch a breath of the band is to check out their four song EP.

As the Trilogy gig wrapped up, it was impossible to ignore the band’s vibrant dynamism. Musically and socially, the band’s diversity blends to create an intoxicating composure. From a slow and sexy ballad that molds the stage into a smoky jazz club to a playful Grateful Dead cover that causes a dim room to suddenly burst with sun, The Skye Downing Band is undeniably refreshing.