The Starlite DeVilles has one thing going for it that few other bands in Athens do — decades of musical experience and knowledge.

Between them, lead singer Eric Gregory and lead guitarist Keith Fowler have been playing music since the late ’80s.

But the DeVilles do have a least one common trait — an interesting backstory.

It began, in effect, in the late ’90s, when the pair began a band called Twang.

By 2001, Fowler had moved on to other projects, and by 2004 the group had disbanded.

In 2008, Gregory was back in the studio working on a solo project.

It’s when he brought in Fowler to do some guitar work for him that things began to click into place. 

With the addition of Brian Crum on drums and Tommy Jones on bass, the Starlite DeVilles were born.

“When we decided we wanted to start another band … I was just trying to come up with a name and [the DeVilles] just sounded good to me,” Gregory said of the title, which was drawn, at least partially, from the name of Atlanta’s only drive-in movie theater.

Together, Gregory and Fowler have been working together off-and-on for the better part of 15 years, and it’s that easy working relationship that helped fuel this new enterprise.

“I can sit there with a guitar and a chord progression in my head and hear the cadence Eric’s gonna put into it,” Fowler said.

The new project finds them working at their most sophisticated — layering Gregory’s alt-country vocals atop a patchwork of punk influences.

“It’s honest. It rocks,” Gregory said of their music. “I think, musically, it’s about themes that everyone can relate to … It’s really just a rock ’n’ roll band.”

The years of experience have certainly allowed them to hone their sound so that they’re now playing “a whole lot cleaner, more precise.”

Their focus has shifted and sharpened over time as well, with each member becoming more attuned to the mechanics and intricacies of songwriting the longer they spent trying their hands at it.

For Gregory, the driving force has been his love of Bob Dylan and Steve Earle, among others.

For Fowler, it began with a year he spent studying at the Atlanta Institute of Music.

“It’s all about the songs when it comes to our influences,” he said, citing the Stones’ “Exile on Main Street” as a favorite. 

“It’s really not intricate, but it’s got rock ’n’ roll. Our emphasis is on the song.”

Experience, however, hasn’t bred over-rigor — after Gregory and Fowler work out a song, they’re always sure to let their bandmates pick out and work on their individual parts.

It’s a collaborative spirit they’ve kept with them from the beginning.

Best of all, the audiences are responding positively to the band’s sound, even if the rockers who front it are a little older — and wiser — than the twenty-somethings they used to be.

They’re not quite as hard as they once were, but all their time onstage has made them consistently confident in delivering on at least one performance promise:

“If [the audience] has half as much fun as we do,” Fowler said, “they’ll have a great time.”