When a band decides the time has come to take its music to the masses, the old life is either drastically changed or discarded altogether. In its place appears the new life as a cyclical vagabond. The road becomes a new home away from home.

The members of moe. know this all too well. For more than nine years, the jam-band stage-stalwarts have done more than their fair share of traveling.

“We quit our day jobs in ’94, and over the next two years, we pretty much played over 200 shows a year all over the country, just in vans or cars or whatever,” says Chuck Garvey, guitarist and vocalist for the group. “Between ’94 and ’96 we did a lot of missionary work driving all over the country playing for people.”

Garvey says he looked at his life at that point much like a traveling minister, preaching the good news. In this case, the good news comes via electric guitar in drawn-out jam-style song structure.

“It’s pretty much the way we had to do it,” he says. “Go to a college town or some place they like music and try and convert them. At that point you’re driving across the country to play for, like, 50 or 60 people and hoping they tell everyone they know. It’s definitely missionary work. You do it for the love of it and traveling and all the other great things that make you want to start doing this.”

Garvey says their love of diversity in music brought the band together more than 10 years ago.

“At the time there wasn’t a jam band scene. Really, we were a bunch of guys who liked a lot of different styles of music,” Garvey says. “We didn’t want to sound like the Grateful Dead. We didn’t want to sound like the Allman brothers. We just liked different styles of music and wanted to put them all together.”

Garvey says moe. tries to establish themselves as unique amongst all the other bands that like to stretch songs to three times their original length.

“I think we’re like the harder edge to some degree. I also think that we have a sense of humor which some musicians don’t necessarily allow to go in their music or their writing,” Garvey says. “They tend to be really serious about it. That’s one thing that’s different about us.”

Garvey acknowledges the virtual impossibility of doing things that are entirely unique in this day and age. He says the band would rather reach their fans using elements with which they’re familiar.

“You can’t do anything that’s completely original. But you can edit, and explore different things, and kind of rearrange them and put your own personal stamp on them. You can’t just invent something,” Garvey says. “Some people do, but they’re kind of savants. And they’re living in their own bubble. That’s not really communicating.”

moe. took a rather unorthodox route when it came to record their new release, “Wormwood” for their self-owned label after leaving mega-label Sony.

“We bought 48 tracks of recording equipment so we could take it on the road and record all our live shows and catalog them. What ended up happening was we could set up and record an album anywhere we wanted to,” Garvey says. “We could record in a bus, we could record in a hotel room, we could record on stage. It just gave us creative flexibility.”

Garvey says this process allowed the band to capture the true experience of their stage show on record but still make a proper album.

“We were able to get the energy of a live performance so it didn’t get sterilized by doing it all in the studio,” Garvey says. “We didn’t know that we were going to be successful at the end, but it ended up being a good way for us to work. We used every trick we knew to make this work out.”

As far as the band’s apparently callous disregard for grammar, Garvey offers little explanation other than moe. “just seemed to work.”

“It’s kind of fun. It has nothing to do with e.e. cummings and the lowercase thing,” he says. “And the period — it just made sense, that it was a statement unto itself. Interpret it how you will.”

Who: moe.

Where: Stephens Auditorium

When: 7:30 p.m. Saturday

Cost: $22.50