By Shannon Sturgis Elvis Perkins in Dearland visits Sticky Fingerz on Nov. 16 on a co-headlining tour with A.A. Bondy, a former rocker who reinvented himself as a folk-singing troubadour, releasing two masterful albums along the way. The 21-and-up show kicks off at 9 p.m. with a $10 cover.

It's a Thursday afternoon in the Hudson River Valley of upstate New York, two days before Halloween, and Elvis Perkins prepares to celebrate the ghoulish holiday with an appearance by his band Elvis Perkins in Dearland at Levon Helm's Midnight Ramble.

"We've been hoping to do [the Midnight Ramble] at some point, being big fans of the man and his music, and being sort of neighbors," said Perkins of the Midnight Ramble hosted by Helm, an Arkansas native, and drummer and vocalist for the legendary rock 'n' roll outfit The Band.

"We live across the Hudson so it's not far at all. It both feels like a neighborhood gig and something outlandish at the same time."

Following Elvis Perkins in Dearland's late night appearance at the impromptu hoedown, the band — Perkins on vocals, guitar and harmonica, Brigham Brough on bass, saxophone and vocals, Wyndham Boylan-Garnett on organ, guitar, harmonium, trombone and vocals, and Nick Kinsey on drums, clarinet and vocals — will once again tour. The monthlong string of dates reaching deep into the South and lasting until the first weekend of December will see the band rubbing figurative elbows with the roots of their self-titled, debut album released in March 2009. The 10-track album is a full-band follow-up to the fingerpicked, acoustic majesty of Perkins' 2007 folk, mostly solo effort Ash Wednesday. The vigorous blast of Americana-flavored rock 'n' roll on the eponymous album has been followed by October's The Doomsday EP, a six-tune collection, including a re-imagining of the joyous, New Orleans jazz funeral blast of the album's "Doomsday" that is a subdued, gospel rendition cleverly titled "Slow Doomsday."

"That's how it was written, with the somber, gospel feel, and we did it with the idea of having both on the album, but there wasn't time or money to do that," said Perkins of the songwriting process behind the two versions of the tune. "So we picked the obvious choice which is the fast version which we'd played live pretty much at every show. It's favorite of ours and a favorite of people at shows, and sort of a staple so we couldn't have very well made the record without that. So it was an easy choice."

Elvis Perkins in Dearland's music is purely rock 'n' roll, drawing from the whiskey warm soul of Van Morrison, the late-night haunting pop of Nick Drake, and the rambling rock of Bob Dylan and Neil Young. "Doomsday" commences with a mournful trombone straight from Jackson Square before exploding with an unbridled energy and Perkins claiming: "I don't let doomsday bother me/Do you let it bother you?" The EP's "Stop Drop Rock and Roll" is a romp mirroring Chuck Berry's '50s rock; the album's "I'll Be Arriving" creeps like kudzu with a bluesy death march; and "Shampoo" is a kiss of the gloaming with Perkins' old soul vocals stating: "Black is the color of a strangled rainbow." But ask Perkins what influenced him and the band to create such heartland music, and the result is a quizzical, meandering answer.

"American is a big and powerful, out-of-control sea monster of a place," Perkins said. "Whether you are born on either side of it, or spend time on the coast or whatever, you can't really escape the music of the land. You really can't get away from that. Certainly some people do, and I'm just theorizing now because I've never really thought about it. I guess it has something to do with the songs, and the music the land itself sings and being receptive to that.

"I don't really know. I really don't know how to make a song. It seems awfully official to be called a songwriter or to be called ... any name we take on professionwise."

No matter how Perkins and band arrived at the music of the self-titled album and The Doomsday EP, the new music is looser and as a result more confident sounding. The music swings with a youthful exuberance when spurred, especially live with the four musicians switching instruments, but also appreciates the beauty of reserved elegance. The change in tone is partly because of the addition of the Dearland in Elvis Perkins in Dearland.

"These guys are great, great musicians," Perkins said. "It's a real natural, organic process that's kind of hard to comment on because it's around us all the time. It's kind of what we're doing."

Before recording Elvis Perkins in Dearland last summer over three weeks at the Clubhouse Studio in Rhinebeck, N.Y., the band had road-tested most of the tunes. The sound of the road was captured in the studio, and a new-found spontaneity was created when Perkins and band came out the other end and started playing the tunes in a live setting, where creating such a full rock 'n' roll fervor is restricted by having only four band members.

"It's impossible to recreate it note for note, and we wouldn't want to do that anyway," Perkins said. "You can't recreate a moment, and you can't recreate sounds that you don't have enough manpower to do. In the end, if a song is seaworthy, it'll float even if we were to play it completely differently."

Elvis Perkins in Dearland visits Sticky Fingerz on Nov. 16 on a co-headlining tour with A.A. Bondy, a former rocker who reinvented himself as a folk-singing troubadour, releasing two masterful albums along the way. The 21-and-up show kicks off at 9 p.m. with a $10 cover.