For new initiates, a brief history: The Punch Brothers were formed six years ago, when mandolin prodigy Chris Thile decided he’d reached the end of the creative line with Nickel Creek, the Grammy-winning acoustic trio he’d joined when he was eight years old. (That’s not a typo.) He recruited a group of similarly fresh-faced virtuosos — Leftover Salmon banjoist Noam Pikelny, Infamous Stringdusters guitarist Chris Eldridge, fiddler Gabe Witcher, and bassist Greg Garrison — to help him record a four-movement, 40-minute “folk-formal” suite titled “The Blind Leaving the Blind”; before they wrestled that beast to the ground, they released in 2006 Thile’s solo album, “How to Grow a Woman From the Ground.” (Garrison has since been replaced by Paul Kowert who, at age 25, is one of the few musicians in the world who can make the rest of the band feel old.)

When “The Blind Leaving the Blind,” which forms the bulk of the Punch Brothers’ debut, “Punch,” was finally released in 2008, it was greeted with rapturous hosannas by the press. The band’s sophomore effort, 2010’s “Antifogmatic,” was similarly praised; in his “slobbering rave” in Paste, Ed Helms, who plays a mean banjo when he’s not working his day job as Dunder Mifflin Scranton branch manager Andy Bernard on “The Office,” wrote that the band was so good, the only explanation was that they were “aliens, and they’re here to take over our world. … [T]heir music is an impossibly perfect mixture of down-home charm and staggering sophistication” that could “only be the result of complex algorithms running on an interplanetary mainframe.”

That makes what the band has achieved on “Who’s Feeling Young Now?” all the more remarkable. The album opens with “Movement and Location,” a propulsive masterpiece that sets the tone, both musically and thematically, for what’s to come. It begins with Thile chopping a rhythm line under a cascade of staccato eighth notes, courtesy of Pikelny and Witcher; when Eldridge and Kowert jump into the fray, it’s off to the contrapuntal races. Thile, whose natural inclination is to tell stories (oftentimes about romance), here veers toward the abstract: “Did he ever live,” he sings, a touch of echo added to his reedy tenor, “in those three and 20 years, for a thing but movement and location?”

That, of course, is a reference to baseball great Greg Maddux, who once summed up his career as one of the best pitchers ever to play the game by saying, “I try to do two things: locate my fastball and change speeds. That’s it. I try to keep it as simple as possible.” With the help of producer Jacquire King, who has worked with Tom Waits, Buddy Guy, Norah Jones and Kings of Leon, the Punch Brothers follow suit, in their own, inimitable way: The shape-shifting time signatures, technical virtuosity and exquisite craftsmanship are all in full effect, but the overriding quality of the dozen songs on “Who’s Feeling Young Now?” is that they pack a visceral punch that’s not dependent on the listener’s musical knowledge or sophistication. It’s hard to imagine another band doing an acoustic rendition of Radiohead’s hypnotic, effect-laden “Kid A” without making it sound gimmicky; in the Punch Brothers’ hands, it’s somehow as powerful and transporting as the original.

I first met the Punch Brothers in 2007, when they were still workshopping “The Blind Leaving the Blind.” Late last month, I sat down with them before the second of the two sold-out shows at the Somerville Theater near Boston that launched their current tour. They’ll be on the road for the next few months; if they’re coming to your town, I strongly recommend checking them out. I imagine that in time, folks who passed up a chance to see the band strut its stuff will feel a little like those New Yorkers who were offered tickets to see the Allmans at the Fillmore East 41 years ago and decided they had something better to do with their time.

What’s been different about the new record?

Chris Thile: We didn’t consciously attempt to make a more accessible record — but we did consciously go in wanting to make a more direct, concise statement. A clearer statement: Basically, making sure that every song started, in our collective mind, with an unassailable kind of motive, an unassailable cornerstone.

Musically or thematically?

Musically, speaking first and foremost. Sometimes that can be in the form of a musical hook that comes prepackaged with words and everything.

Like what?

Like “Patchwork Girlfriend.” [He sings: “Guess I need a little love from every square of my sweet little patchwork girlfriend / Of my sweet little patchwork girlfriend.”] That just seemed like it was working on all fronts, and that was a big difference. That each thing, each song had to get all five of us moving —

Gabe Witcher: Like, physically moving.

Thile: It couldn’t just appeal to us cerebrally, like, “What a cool idea!”

Was that not true on previous records?

Chris Eldridge: I think we learned from the last record. [Producer] Jon Brion — he did “Antifogmatic” — one of the lessons he really tried to instill in us is that as long as somebody is moving when they were listening to our music, they couldn’t accuse our music of being overly intellectual or too fancy. [Brion’s production credits include albums by Aimee Mann, Rufus Wainwright, Fiona Apple, Spoon and Kanye West.] He was just really trying to instill in us the kind of visceral hit that makes great music great.

Thile: The only problem, of course, is he got that message to us too late in the game.

Eldridge: He should have gotten a kind of pre-production credit on this album. He comes from that same school [as "Who’s Feeling Young Now" producer Jacquire King], who was constantly asking us to peel back one layer —

Noam Pikelny: — or defend choices. This was the first time we met a sixth person preceding recording where we established a trust between — we were playing these songs that were kind of half formed, or just seeds of songs, and [King] was completely frank with us. He would tell us, “I love what’s going on here but all of a sudden you’ve completely lost me. This was going great and now I have no idea what you guys are trying to do. You have to either be more eloquent in how you’re constructing this or you have to peel it back —”

Witcher: “— and focus in on two or three things that make this song this song, focus in on those and let those be the elements. Don’t get in the way of those ideas coming across.”

Is there a song on the album where you were getting in the way and Jacquire forced you to peel it back?

Thile: “Clara” got simplified. We kept kind of trying to come up with more — basically that song has an almost Baroque harmonic scheme. And I think as a result, we were kind of layering in, kind of like a Bach chorale or a Brandenburg concerto or something like that — but still at its core, that’s a song. That song is a song — a melody, and some nice harmony — and that’s what it needed to be. We kept trying to add stuff to it and it kept not being as enjoyable as just hearing that melody and playing those chords. And so what we ended up doing is adding to the core of the song, only a bass — basically all that song has is the harmony it started with, the melody and bass line. And then what we would add is, on those channels, you can almost just, instead of adding parts, you’re reinforcing existing parts. And we did a lot more of that on this record. Instead of adding to the core idea, if there’s like two or three core ideas, instead of adding a fourth and fifth idea, with the members of the band — which is sort of how “Antifogmatic” worked, you know, look at something “Don’t Need No,” or “You Are,” or “Me and Us,” or —

Pikelny: — or “Woman and the Bell.”

Thile: Absolutely. In those, each guy has a fairly significant idea expressed — and those fourth and fifth ideas are not actually imperative. They don’t have to be there. And it served to obscure the ones that do have to be where they were.

Pikelny: It’s probably a sign of the time — we had endless time when we were making “Antifogmatic” compared to the time we had available [to record "Who’s Feeling Young Now"].

Endless time in the studio?

Pikelny: Endless time in New York arranging it. We would spend weeks and weeks just on a single song.

When you recorded your first album, “Punch,” you weren’t all living in New York, right? And for “Antifogmatic,” you were?

Right — we were all in the same place, and there was this sense that if we didn’t all have our hands full, we weren’t giving the world all that we could give it.

Witcher: I think there’s also a large sense of “The Blind Leaving the Blind” being such a huge undertaking for everyone, that all of a sudden, if we weren’t that involved in trying to make music — you know, ["Antifogmatic" had] shorter songs but, like, things still being that intense for us as musicians trying to perform it, then we were, you know, copping out in a way.

Was there also a sense that, you had recorded this 42-minute, four-movement suite on your first album, and if you weren’t equally ambitious in whatever you did next, then you wouldn’t be pushing yourself?

Pikelny: Yeah. And Jacquire, his contribution as far as arranging the songs wasn’t just in the peeling back  —there were specific examples where he convinced us to be more bold in how quickly we could move through certain sections of tunes. We thought, like, ‘Oh, no, we have to do this multiple times before you can move on.’

Why?

We thought maybe we were trying to cram in too much information in too little time, and if you didn’t get a repeat, you couldn’t latch on to [a phrase], and by the time the next section came through, you’d just be foggy as to where it was going. But I think some of those things made the music more impactful. We had been a little conservative in our thinking how many times these ideas had to be repeated after they were introduced.

Thile: “Clara” went that way, too. It got skimmed down by 30 seconds — just things like, let’s get to the next verse, I’m ready for the next verse, let’s go straight to the bridge.

Witcher: That was actually a last minute studio recording: In the morning, not getting it right, then breaking for lunch, saying, ‘Why don’t we try this and this,’ getting back in there and going, ‘That works, now we’re there.’

Pikelny: I think back to “How To Grow A Woman From The Ground,” I still think that was one of our most successful records and it was something we did very, very quickly. We had, what, how many days? Three days. Three days to rehearse. And at that time we barely knew each other musically, but the language—

Thile: —whatever worked the fastest was what we had to do—

Pikelny: It was kind of a roots music. We all had the vocabulary to go through this material and create arrangements and create songs as a band would play them as if they had been on the road for a couple years within three days because it was so familiar to our backgrounds. And I think everything that has come since that record — “Blind Leaving the Blind” and “Antifogmatic” — I think that allowed us to approach playing our own original music with the same kind of confidence and abandon as we approached the music on “How to Grow.”

You mean you have identified a musical vocabulary as a band that you can inhabit without needing to—

Thile: Yeah, that can rival the kind of vocabulary that comes from growing up in a tradition. That’s a great point, that we have, the five of us, now, have a shared vocabulary enough to where we can actually arrive at things as intuitively as we arrived at, like, the “Brakeman’s Blues” [by Jimmie Rodgers] arrangement on “How To Grow A Woman From The Ground.”

Pikelny: That’s an element of it, but we also have the experience of “Blind Leaving the Blind,” and “Antifogmatic,” and all the shows we did in New York as residencies working on all these covers — just this language. We expanded our palette to something that was kind of beyond the kind of roots music we grew up with. So we worked through putting these songs together almost at a pace that was similar to the “How To Grow A Woman From The Ground” sessions. Of course, it was definitely it was more in depth; we didn’t do this record in three days. But there were certain songs, like “Movement and Location,” that were pretty much fully formed except for the lyrics, while Jacquire was there in an afternoon.

Was it a shorter timeframe because you’re all busy with other projects, or was it intentional?

Thile: It was almost as much a part of the process as anything. We can’t obsess about these arrangements; all we end up doing is obscuring our own point. And it’s not to say I’m not proud of “Antifogmatic” and “The Blind Leaving The Blind.” I’m proud of them. I feel like they’re very sort of tautly constructed — they’re just taut. They’re like — they’re fragile.

There’s not a lot of room to breathe.

I think we feel more comfortable in our skin as a band playing this new stuff. I think early on, we had to refer to stuff we’d been doing for decades for it to feel that natural and for us to have the authority. In the five and a half years that we’ve been together, we’ve put that together with this brain trust that now even with original music we’re playing — it like it’s been ours for decades.

Do you have plans for what is next?

I think we want to know what this feels like first. That’s my sense, at least. This process is only half done; now it’s time to see how the collaborator is—

This process meaning this album?

Yeah — I think the concept of audience as collaborator on this is significant. Their input on this is really important to us.

Has the audience collaborated on the previous two albums – or how the two albums existed in the world after they came out?

“Blind Leaving the Blind” was almost a conscious dismissal of the importance of the artist-audience relationship for me, almost as a knee-jerk reaction to my frustration in Nickel Creek, my feeling so beholden to the crowd, feeling like I had to play music that I hated or they would want their money back. Music that I wrote in the pea-soup fog of adolescence had to be performed to prevent massive disappointment in our audience. And I just got to my mid-20s, as this musician taking music more seriously than anything in his life, feeling like, ‘What am I doing? I’m playing music that I hate, that I wrote when I was 16. And I’m 25 now — I have big ideas!’

And I’m really — I’m proud of [“The Blind Leaving the Blind”] — but I was only thinking about what I wanted to hear, only thinking about what would be interesting to me. And when I thought about this ensemble — a bluegrass ensemble — I thought, ‘Why not write a really ambitious kind of folk-formal fusion that also takes into account the fact that folk music is never fully composed and then get guys who can really play.’

The idea was essentially a solo project, and we didn’t know enough about the Punch Brothers as an entity to know if that was really appropriate yet. That was our identity then, it was kind of this brainchild of mine that was made better by everyone’s participation and had a lot of potential as a more collaborative effort. So with that project, what I hadn’t really taken into consideration in a compositional process was how other people affect our own — the audience’s impact on the performance, how the environment would impact our own perception of what we were doing, and what we wanted to be doing.

It sounds like it took a while for you to be comfortable with the idea that caring how the audience reacts can be art of the creative process — that that doesn’t mean it’s not creative or you’re not being true to yourself.

That’s exactly right.

The Roadhouse is on Park Place between Church and West Broadway. The chain-link fence set up as a perimeter around what was the World Trade Center is tattooed with hand-lettered signs cheekily touting the bar: “Bin Laden Missed Us; Don’t You Too,” “Meet Ground Zero Workers And Buy ‘Em One,” “Wash The Dust Down.” In the three weeks since the Roadhouse reopened, it’s become a drop-in site for the electricians, metalworkers and emergency personnel who have been all but living in lower Manhattan for the last two months.

Late Monday morning, it was still unclear if New York had a new ground zero — if the American Airlines flight that turned a residential Queens neighborhood into this month’s vision of hell was the result of another terrorist attack or was just a bitterly cruel accident. But at the Roadhouse, where PB&J goes for $3 a pop and the all-beef hot dogs are 2 inches thick, the customers besides Bell — the New Yorkers — didn’t have a whole lot of interest in the details on screen. As noon rolled around, a group of burly, hard-hatted men strode in, said their hellos to Jessica and Virginia, and sat down for some beer and grease.

And so, two months and a day after Sept. 11, disaster is part of the New York landscape. In the tumult following the World Trade Center attacks, there were a lot of prognosticators claiming that the country’s psyche would change forever. Comedy, and especially irony, was defunct. And New Yorkers would decamp en masse if the city faced further attacks.

That all seems like so long ago now. Also Monday, Mayor Giuliani said the city was doing sweeps on the subway system to test for anthrax — just to be extra careful — and ridership was at normal levels throughout the day. In the morning, just after 9 a.m., another American Airlines flight became a fuel-gorged missile, and the city flinched but went on its way. Indeed, New York seems poised to adapt to the constant threat of terror in much the way that Jerusalem has reacted to Palestinian attacks or London to IRA bombings: with caution, sure, but also with a psychologically sound resolve to keep on keeping on.

“Our perception of what this place is like back home is so different,” Bell said. “It’s like, ‘Don’t go out at night. Don’t take the subway.’ But it’s not like that at all. It seems safer here than anywhere.” Jimmy, Frankie, Charlie and Richie — the quartet of emergency personnel who navigated through the morning’s Level 1 security precautions at ground zero to get to the Roadhouse — agreed.

“In a way, I’m glad this happened in New York,” said Charlie, an electrician, referring to the World Trade Center attacks. “I mean, we can bounce back. We’re used to going forward, to dealing with things and moving on. Can you imagine if it happened somewhere else? They’d never recover.”

As he was speaking, Jimmy was hunched over a set of interconnected iron rings; the trick was to untangle them so one of the rings was freed. He was on his second beer; the next one was on the house. “What’d you say, Charlie?” he asked, still bent over. “You know how to do this?”

Calhoun hovered near the men, refilling beers and slicing limes. She moved to New York from San Diego on Sept. 1. She’s a dancer and has been tending bar at the Roadhouse to help pay bills. “My parents are like, ‘Well, when are you coming home?’ But I’m not leaving. I mean, I’m not even scared being here.”

Bush administration press secretary Ari Fleischer came on TV. As I strained to read what Fleischer was saying, a young man walked in. He was wearing a wool Yankees cap pulled down over his brow and was toting an L.L. Bean backpack. He said his name was Oren (“no last name, please”) and was visiting from Israel. He said his family was fine: “It’s no problem there. It’s not bad.”

And then, without removing his eyes from the split screen of Fleischer and the burning rubble, he said, “I hope it was the terrorists.” For a moment I thought I had misunderstood him. “Then we go in and really get the fucking Arabs. Then we can go in and take care of it all.”

Steve Earle and Sheryl Crow cover the song here, and perhaps director Robert Greenwald thought that the new performance would inch the song away from cinematic clichi. If anyone can get away with singing lines like “Our souls’ve been psychedelicized,” and “I might get burned up by the sun,” set against knee-jerk snippets of dialogue (“I think we stand for the destruction of property”) it’s Earle, whose timeworn voice conveys a thick layer of grit with every syllable he utters. The same, alas, cannot be said for Sheryl Crow, whose ridiculous yelping and forced inflections are actually comical. Sadly, this is not a farce.

That’s the problem with a lot of the “Steal This Movie” soundtrack, which pairs contemporary musicians with aging classics from Dylan, Country Joe & the Fish and others. Those ’60s show horses don’t age well, and when they’re updated they tend to sound overly earnest and cloying. Bonnie Raitt is a hell of a musician, and a damn fine singer, but she sounds sorely out of her league trying to tweak Bob Dylan’s “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue.” Joan Osborne and Jackson Browne don’t fare much better on “My Back Pages” — “I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now.” Mary Chapin Carpenter is a hair better on her version of Donovan’s “Mellow Yellow,” but it’s never more than mildly interesting.

Not even the intact period pieces — Edwin Starr’s “War” and Eric Burdon and Billy Preston’s “Power to the People” — can hold this effort together. Two Country Joe & the Fish songs work better, if only because they haven’t been so played out; also, there’s a feral intensity in hearing Joe McDonald snarl, “Send you back to Texas/Make you work on your ranch,” about the then-president, Lyndon B. Johnson.

And then there’s Ani DiFranco, who actually pulls off what must have been expected of the entire soundtrack. DiFranco does two songs here, Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land” and Phil Ochs’ “When I’m Gone.” (Ochs himself performs “I Ain’t Marching Anymore.”) Set over a single, shimmering guitar, DiFranco wraps her voice, at once mellifluous and caustic, around these two old folk standards. Unlike Raitt, unlike Osborne and Browne, DiFranco makes these songs sound fresh and exciting. She gives them new life, a sense of continuity and shared legacy between Abbie Hoffman’s heady ’60s and today. Dragging herself across “When I’m Gone,” it’s hard not to get choked up. And when she sings about a sign warning that a swimming hole is “Private Property,” she sounds angry and hopeful, bitter and wistful all at once.

Earle is also a literary figure: He has been through dope addictions, jail stints, radical politics and six marriages (but only five wives). His is the kind of redemption tale that self-righteous “I read the New Yorker but haven’t read a novel since college” types grasp with dedicated fervor. Earle’s real, man.

So it was no surprise when writers seemed to outnumber any other single occupation at Wednesday’s show on the western fringes of downtown Manhattan. Poets, novelists, essayists, journalists and editors: All manner of scribblers were in attendance, hoping for a taste of Earle’s transcendent grace. Unfortunately, it was nowhere to be found. The Roxy, a cavernous club that doubles as a roller-skating rink and feels more like a Texas honky-tonk than a New York club, has some of the worst acoustics in the city. Vocals get lost and sound flat, reverb overwhelms and any attempts at subtlety are lost. On Wednesday, to the right of the stage, the bass was so loud people were clutching their chests in pain; to the left, the sound was so muddied that many folks stopped even trying to listen and just shot the shit at the bar.

Which isn’t to say Earle didn’t give it a shot. His four-piece band, the Dukes, supplies Earle with the kind of two-fisted, straight-ahead, power chording that Crazy Horse supported Neil Young with to such great effect 25 years ago. And Earle played for more than two hours, switching guitars after virtually every song. Most of his latest release, the typically splendid “Transcendental Blues,” got a turn, from the show-opening title track to the more gentle “The Boy Who Never Cried.” Toward the end of the show, Earle played the most arresting song on the album, “Over Yonder (Jonathan’s Song),” an anti-death penalty song Earle wrote about an executed convicted murderer he had become friends with. “Give my radio to Johnson,” Earle sang, “Thibodeaux can have my fan/Send my Bible home to Mama/Call her every now and then.” Or at least I assume that’s what Earle sang, because that’s what he sings on the album; at the Roxy, the words were totally indecipherable, the music drowned out by cocktail chatter.

After “Over Yonder,” Earle segued into the ferocious “All of My Life,” run through with feedback and anger. The contrast caused some of the audience to look up in surprise at Earle, with his head down and glasses askew. It’s too bad the rest of the show couldn’t have captured this same intensity.

In the early 1970s, Austin wasn’t known for much besides the University of Texas and the state’s capitol building. Janis Joplin had hung around before moving to San Francisco, and there was a small music scene for country balladeers like Townes Van Zandt and the singer-songwriters of the Flatlanders, but the scene wasn’t recognized as much by outsiders. The airport wasn’t, as it is now, festooned with posters proclaiming it “The Live Music Capital of the World.” Movie stars didn’t live there, and neither did high-tech moguls. There were no hip rock ‘n’ roll festivals every spring.

The arc of Nelson’s career, and, one could argue, the legacy of Austin, changed 25 years ago. In 1975, after signing to Columbia, Nelson assembled a seven-piece band — two drummers, a pianist, a harmonica player, a pair of guitarists and a bass player — and set out to record an epic tale of a wandering preacher: The Red Headed Stranger from Blue Rock, Montana. Compared to the overblown orchestral country records that were popular at the time, it was an odd little album, just over 34 minutes long, full of two-minute instrumental rags (“Down Yonder”) and minute-long interludes. The songs were here and there: “Red Headed Stranger” is an old Edith Lindeman-Carl Stutz number that Nelson used to sing to his children to woo them to sleep, and Fred Rose’s “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain” was previously recorded by both Elvis Presley and Gene Autry.

When Columbia chief Bruce Lundvall got the album, he figured, as he says in this reissue’s liner notes, “It may not be an important commercial record by Willie, but it’ll be a valuable catalog album. And everyone thought it was nice.” “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain” ended up making a dent on the pop charts, and the record sold 2 million copies within a couple of years of being released; today, that number is over 3 million.

Willie Nelson was finally a star. And in the past 25 years, Austin has become somewhat of a star as well. For bucking against the biggies, and making a spare, personal album in a time of slick excess, Nelson is now a wizened uncle of Austin outlaws and musicians spurned by Nashville — musicians like Lucinda Williams, Steve Earle and Jimmie Dale Gilmore. And Austin claims it is home to as many aspiring bands per capita as any city in the country. It remains one of the few American cities where locals pride themselves on the music scene, where the newspapers cover music like other papers cover sports and where dinner and a live band is a perfectly normal Saturday night date for adults.

“Red Headed Stranger” begins with six cascading chords, played on bass, acoustic guitar and piano. Then the musicians cut out for Nelson’s first line: “It was the time of the preacher/When the story began.” The entire album works like this. Songs seem to have no beginnings or ends — they just waft out of the air. Later, as Nelson is singing “Can I Sleep in Your Arms,” all the instruments cut out except a barely perceptible piano. As Nelson begins singing again he’s joined by a single picked note on guitar, then a pair of notes, then a bass line, then the whole band. It’s as if more than one instrument would clog the majesty of the moment.

Roughly, the album tells the story of an itinerant preacher whose lady left him; the album follows him as he wanders across the Old West and finally finds redemption in a new love. Billy Callery’s “Hands on the Wheel” marks the exact moment: “And with no place to hide/I look in your eyes/And I found myself in you/And I feel like I’m going home.”

This Columbia reissue, part of the second batch of Columbia/Legacy’s “American Milestones” series (other new titles include albums by Johnny Cash, the Carter Family, George Jones and Johnny Horton) includes four bonus tracks, if you count a 35-second riff on Bach’s “Minuet in G” as one. Hank Williams’ “I Can’t Help It (If I’m Still in Love With You)” is slightly jauntier than most of the album, and it’s nice to hear. But it’s the quick shuffle of “Bonaparte’s Retreat,” with its refrain — “So I held her in my arms/And told her of her many charms” — that is the best addition. With Mickey Raphael’s otherworldly harmonica moaning like the wind blowing through a screen door and Bobbie Nelson’s brisk piano, “Bonaparte’s Retreat” is an example of how Nelson can take a song and really own it — a skill he would ride to the top of the country charts with “Stardust” later in the decade.

In the last 10 years, Nelson has returned to the flowing beauty of “Red Headed Stranger” with near-perfect albums like 1998′s “Teatro.” Now 67, Nelson still lives in Austin, and still throws an annual Fourth of July barbecue, a fitting fete to celebrate a small musical revolution that ended up creating a little colony down South.