Echobrain: Bowled Over.

Rock dreams. Teenage drummer, Brian Sagrafena, attends a Super Bowl party thrown by an acquaintance. Metallica's bass player, Jason Newsted, also happens to be there. Halftime at the football and the kid jumps in a drumset and thumps it out. Newsted's impressed. The pair check out of the touchdown showdown and head for Newsted's home studio, the Chophouse, for a jam.

Before you can say double time or Ginger Baker, Sagrafena has introduced Newsted to his songwriting guitarist mate Dylan Donkin. They all jam. That was seven years ago. Newsted, having quit Metallica, has formed a band with the pair. Echobrain apparently make alt rock according to Billboard. For a country that has at least 150 ways to categorise rock alone, what that means is anybody's guess. It's melodic, harmonic, intelligent and likeable. Donkin is an obviously good songwriter with a Buckleyesque kind of voice and the musical fusion between a trio that comes from rather diverse backgrounds works well.

“You can't help but be excited. This is three different types of music players in one band going wherever we want, playing whatever styles we want. There wasn't even any grand plan to share the music with the public until about 2000 when we started formulating the demos a little more seriously. It's a jam band that's come to life," Newsted says. "They may be young but they've both already been playing for more than a decade. And Dylan is just, I don't know, almost a prodigy. One of those people who is just blessed with a gift - in his case to make music.”

“It seems kind of fated the way we met but over the years I've always been looking out for people to play with. It doesn't matter what their situation is, I'll approach them, ask them if they'd like to jam and put a bit on tape."

Those Chophouse sessions, incidentally, now stretch over hundreds of hours of everything from avant-garde horn music to soul singers and hardcore electronic artists. Oh, and no overdubs allowed.

"You are what you play on the day. It's just music, man," Newsted laughs. "I like to play it all. That's what it is about.”

"I see a guy playing in a wedding band at some friend's betrothal and I'll say to him 'Do you want to come and rock with us?' and I end up finding out he's some incredibly talented graduate of London School Of Music who can totally kick ass when you let him. Little things like that or Brian and I meeting at that party; all that happens for a reason, man."

Sagrafena's dad was actually drummer for the old '70s San Francisco funk/soul band, Sassafras, whose albums still pop up in the second hand bins so he grew up on Tower Of Power and Count Basie. Dylan has seen Led Zeppelin's The Song Remains The Same at least 700 times. And Newsted is just bloody famous: 15 years with the world's most powerful and all consuming metal band does that to you.

"There are certain expectations of you and on your quality time when you are a member of this incredible monster (Metallica) that represents so many people," he says. "In that situation you just have to realise your role in the organsiation and do the best you can. In any organisation, no matter what it is, you want your best guys doing what they do best, so you get the best songwriter to write the songs, the best businessmen to take care of business, the best people person taking care of the people - that was me. That's what we did for a long time. Obviously, the best American band that has ever done it.”

"However, it was such a big organsiation. It wasn't just enough to be a bass player who kept up with and constantly improved his chops. You had to be able to do so many things that most other folks wouldn't have to do.”

"For me the most enjoyable part of being free is that in a way I've returned to my roots but with Echobrain I'm actually experiencing something I've never done before. I went from playing to 200 people with my first band Flotsam & Jetsam to arenas with Metallica. I never played 100 to 6,000 capacity places, so I really like that. It's like doing it all over again from the start and I like to make all the decisions so there's no record companies pushing me around. I'm making some sensitive decisions on a lot of things since it is my dime that's backing the US tour and financing the album. I'm calling the shots, man."