Midland Praises Mark Wystrach’s Future Bride, Tyler Haney: ‘She Accepts the Band’

Midland’s Mark Wystrach will soon have a wife, and his fellow bandmates, Cameron Duddy and Jess Carson, couldn’t be happier for him. The lead singer got engaged to his longtime girlfriend, Tyler Haney, in May, with his future bride earning high praise from the other trio members.

“Mark and Ty are the perfect fit,” Duddy boasted to their record label. “She’s athletic, Mark’s athletic. She’s hardworking, Mark’s hardworking. She has a youthful spirit, as does Mark. And she accepts the band as the extra baggage, as all of our wives have had to do in the last couple of years. And that can really scare a lot of people, I feel like. And this is Mark’s life and she has her own incredible entrepreneurship and company to deal with.”

Wystrach waited a long time to find the person he wanted to spend his life, but insists she was worth the wait.

“You know, you wait a whole life and maybe multiple lifetimes to meet the right one, it seems like,” Wystrach said. “And I went through some of the wrong ones, and you gotta do that to get to the right one.”

Haney founded the popular clothing brand, Outdoor Voices, and met the singer on a blind date in Austin, Texas. While Haney didn’t say how long it took her to fall in love, Wystrach felt an instant connection.

“I knew from the first moment I laid eyes on her that I was going to marry her,” Wystrach told PEOPLE.

Wystrach might have known he would eventually pop the question, but the actual proposal was rather spontaneous.

“It kind of was unplanned and just unfolded naturally when we were barefooted and on a walk with our little puppies,” Wystrach recalled. “It was right after a big thunderstorm, and the sun just popped [up] out of nowhere, and I knew it was a sign.”

Midland’s sophomore album, Let It Roll, will be released on Aug. 23. Although the group hasn’t divulged too many details about their new record, they did previously reveal that it was influenced, at least in part, by Chris Stapleton.

“I think what we’re tapping into with a lot of the bro country or the more pop country is that, what happened with Chris Stapleton, people couldn’t quite put their finger on it,” Wystrach said. “But Chris Stapleton’s tapping into the blues and into soul, and it’s really in that performance where you hear that coming through. And that’s a big influence for us, is on the soul and on the blues side.”

“There’s an authenticity to all those lyrics and the way that we sing and the way that we present it,” he added, “and it is different from a lot of that stuff, I guess.”

Photo Credit: Getty images/Roger Kisby