In addition to this thoughtful Dispatch piece, we have a few exclusive videos of the group recorded at The Hangout. Click here to watch “Two Coins” and click here to watch “Not Messin’.”_

On a surprisingly mild Tennessee afternoon in mid-June, the members of Dispatch are relaxing backstage at the Bonnaroo Music & Arts Festival. Chad Stokes and Brad Corrigan, two thirds of the band, are watching a few minutes of the Punch Brothers’s set with their longtime manager, Steve Bursky. He first saw Dispatch in high school, eventually joining their team and has since parlayed his experience into a management company that represents the likes of Passion Pit, Dr. Dog, Weird Owl and White Rabbits. Dalton Sim, the band’s other manager who represents groups such as fun. and Guster, is standing a few feet away while Pete Francis, the band’s missing member and new father of an 18-month-old boy, is still on his way to the festival site.

For the past few days, Dispatch have been hunkering down in nearby Nashville trying to figure out how to play the songs off their new album Circles Around the Sun, their first full-length release in 12 years – and first since the band burned out and called it quits just as they started to break into the mainstream.

“We have this backward way of doing things now where we don’t test the songs live before we record them,” says Stokes, the band’s primary guitarist co-lead singer and hippie soul, whose blonde dreads remain the band’s most visible hallmark. “All of a sudden, we’re like, ‘Shit, how are we gonna do that live?’”

When Dispatch headlines the Which Stage later that afternoon, they play for more than 50,000 people. For a large portion of that crowd, the loose-limbed folk/rock/funk/hip-hop troupe was – consciously or not – their gateway into the independent-minded live music scene. For many others, they were also the first band they saw live or even just liked without their parents’ influence.

“There’s this weird phenomenon where people kind of get into us and then, kind of pass us down to their younger cousin – and then, it just keeps rolling,” Stokes says with a chuckle.

While Dispatch wasn’t the first band to benefit from the Internet’s increased power, they helped prove that you could gain national credibility without a major label just as file-sharing started to chip away at the traditional music industry model. Like the Grateful Dead, Phish and Dave Matthews Band before them, they also learned early on that a dedicated fanbase is a more valuable investment than a hit single. But horsing around in their backstage compound at Bonnaroo, the members of Dispatch come across more like retired college athletes than industry trendsetters as they begin to embark on their second run of “reunion” shows.

“We were hanging out and [the reunion] just happened,” says Francis, the cleanest cut member of the band, who’s also responsible for some of the band’s best ballads. “It was pretty spontaneous.”

Stokes adds: “I was really missing Brad’s voice a lot. All our other bands have their own thing but our voices are what make this Dispatch.”

“Whatever, dude! We’d never let you record nine-minute songs like you do [in State Radio] – in drop D!,” chimes in Corrigan with a laugh and pat on Stokes’ shoulder. In the early days, the husky Colorado native served as the band’s chief spokesman and remains the most comfortable doing interviews.
“We all asked each other, ‘Will you listen to this song and tell me what part sucks,’” he continues shifting to a more serious tone. “It’s always a risky thing when you’re being super vulnerable and sharing something personal and meaningful to you – it’s hard to hear if it is negative. [Before we broke up], there was more fear and more insecurity about, ‘Will they like this tune? If they don’t, how will I take it?’ You can feel when there’s a little bit of fear in the room.”

Bonnaroo 2012 photo by John Patrick Gatta

Even by grassroots standards, Dispatch had a unique career arc. Chad Stokes, Pete Francis and Brad Corrigan formed One Fell Swoop as undergrads at Vermont’s Middlebury College in the mid ‘90s, around the time when the last wave of alternative rock kissed the jam, acoustic folk and ska sounds that ruled independent rock during the second half of the decade.

Initially, One Fell Swoop was largely an acoustic outfit but after an early reviewer referred to them as the Indio Boys, the members of the band quickly plugged in. Though they were all guitarists, Corrigan learned drums to fill out their electric sound and the group made a conscious effort to switch up their instruments as well as their styles between songs. From the beginning, each member of the band was a distinct individual and capable frontman, which worked in their favor when they were getting along – and sped up their demise when they weren’t.

“Pete has always been a poet at heart and driven by lyrical imagery,” Stokes says. “Chad was at the other end of the spectrum,” Corrigan adds. “He’s got this wild imagination and wrote from rock to reggae to folk to blues to Latin music.”

Eventually renaming themselves Dispatch, the trio made their name playing sweaty, beer-soaked shows at Northeast colleges and prep schools as well as jam-friendly clubs like New York’s Wetlands Preserve. After a few years of grassroots success, they exploded around the new millennium as Napster and other early social media and file-sharing sites started to rule college campuses.

Without a record label or support of a major management team, Dispatch became something of a generational unifier from coast-to-coast while they were still largely playing small clubs around the Northeast.

“In the beginning, it was so un-self-conscious,” Stokes reminisces of the band’s early days. “You have no idea what you are doing, but you are doing it because you love it. I don’t think we had a collective vision.”

But just as the band started graduating from 500-1,000 person clubs, various fissures began to fracture the band’s foundation: Corrigan was frustrated about being regulated to the drums; the band faced increased pressure to sign a major label deal; all three musicians wanted to record more of their own songs; the members’ individual writing styles were moving in vastly different directions; years of club gigs were wearing on the band’s friendship; and the only thing they could all agree on is that the music had stalled.

“That the amount of touring and being attached at the hip makes you pretty close and then there was a pivot point,” Stokes says. “Things were coming to a head right on our last tour in 2001. It felt like our hearts weren’t in it anymore.”

Corrigan concurs: “You go through so many highs and lows together that you figure out how to cope, but at a point, the tension is unhealthy if you’re just so freakin’ exhausted that you don’t know how to deal with it. You don’t know how to face it head on.”

After playing their biggest headlining show to that point – a gig at Denver, Colo.‘s City Lights Pavillion that drew 10,000 people – and making their national TV debut, the band went on indefinite hiatus in mid-2002. They reconvened for one final blowout in 2004: an intimate warm-up show for a massive free event at Boston’s Hatch Shell that reportedly drew more than 100,000 people and closed the Storrow Drive cross-town expressway.

“It would have been really nice – honestly – to make some money back in the early days, but we would’ve been prostituting ourselves because we were frickin’ miserable,” Corrigan admits.

After the 2004 breakup, Stokes focused on his politically-charged rock band State Radio, which built a national audience that rivaled Dispatch’s in size. (When fans tell Stokes he sounds like the “guy from Dispatch,” he says they are brothers or cousins). He advocated for Troy Davis – even visiting the man who many believed was a wrongly convicted death row inmate – and worked with the mentally challenged.

Francis divided his time between singer/songwriter solo gigs and working as a member of various backing bands. He had a short stint on a major label, Hollywood, but quickly returned to his independent roots.

Corrigan, the band’s most spiritual member and a devout Christian, switched back to guitar to perform under the name Braddigan. His busy schedule included everything from acoustic performances at Easter services to a film on Central American poverty to proper club dates.

Rather unexpectedly, the band reunited for a series of benefits for the people of Zimbabwe that culminated with three sold-out shows at Madison Square Garden in 2007. (Stokes has done charity work in the African country). In a symbolic move, they drove their beat-up van into the arena each night and performed on its roof. For the first time, the music industry took notice but, instead of capitalizing on their success, the band members once again went their own ways.

In 2009, Dispatch quietly reunited for another Zimbabwe benefit – this time at Washington D.C.‘s Kennedy Center – and all three members of Dispatch seemed content to regroup for a big show every few years. Since their previous “reunion shows” took place in Boston (Stokes’ hometown) and New York (Francis’ current location), they set their sites on Morrison, Colo.‘s Red Rocks (near Corrigan’s home base) for the 2011 gigs.

But when the time came to prep for their next reunion event, Stokes tossed out a different idea. “We would spend 30 days getting ready for one show and have all this pressure,” he says. “So I thought, ‘Why don’t we do a mini-tour instead’ and the guys said, ‘If we’re doing a mini tour, we need some new songs.’”

While sitting at a café not far from his Manhattan home a few weeks after Bonnaroo, Francis recalls the trio getting together at his apartment in late 2010. “We got together and found out we had more than two or three songs,” he says. They passed around an acoustic guitar and a few pints and started to flesh out each other’s ideas. “[That’s when] we decided that we wanted to make a record.”

“I had a bunch of songs that didn’t really fit State Radio,” the prolific Stokes adds in late June while driving his veggie-powered car to another recording session. (This time for a bonus track to accompany a solo album that he plans to reissue). “We all needed that time away to figure out who we were outside of the band because we’d been so insular. We didn’t even really know who we were as people, individually. Once we had some space, we realized that we like being around each other and we’ve been through a lot together. We still get a kick out of each other.”

Corrigan says they’ve all grown up and that, as a result, there is less ego involved combined with more honesty and humility. “We were like brothers until we broke up and that was a painful breakup,” he says. “Now, we have forgiven each other and learned so much from a lot of the arguments and battles that we had back in the day. We’re way stronger than we would be if we’d never gone through some of those intense valleys. We’ve seen each other at our worst and we’ve also seen each other on the mountaintops.”

When it was finally time to enter the studio, the band – for the first time – looked for outside help. In their search, they found noted indie rock producer Peter Katis (The National, Jónsi) through their shared management connection with Guster.

“We recorded almost all our records with Jack Gauthier,” Corrigan relays. “But he’s such a good friend that it would be hard for him to say, ‘Here’s what I’m hearing.’ We wanted someone who was going to play the producer role exclusively.”

The first thing they did was record a modern version of their ‘90s anthem “The General” and gave it away online. Then, they completed six new tracks for a self-titled EP released last May. “We definitely wanted somebody who had a style, and we listened to a lot of his records,” Francis says. “He had good insight into the songs.”

Dispatch took a break from the studio in mid-2011 for their first tour in almost a decade. Hitting mostly sheds and outdoor theaters, it was by far their biggest national tour. Success gave them some helpful luxuries: the band recruited some auxiliary musicians to flesh out their arrangements which allowed Corrigan to play more guitar. They traveled in eco-friendly buses and were able to donate money to educational charities in every market that they visited (instead of focusing on one cause).

From Stokes’ perspective, knowing that they would never be able to outdraw their initial reunion show actually took the pressure off the band and allowed them to focus on the music. “Once you kind of give up on that, then you can just have fun up there,” he says. “Getting a little bit of space from each other and therefore appreciating who those guys are as they’ve grown into men made it less about who is singing the most and more about trying to get the best songs out there.”

“There’s a lot of refining tensions that are happening onstage or in the studio, or even in our financial decisions as a band,” Corrigan admits. “But all those tensions are really good when we’re trusting each other, as opposed to the three of us just insisting on doing things our own way.”

They reconvened with Katis last fall to record the full-length Circles Around the Sun. “He gets into the DNA of the band and takes the band where they’re supposed to be headed as opposed to putting the Peter Katis stamp on the band’s sound,” Stokes says. “When you’ve known each other so long, it felt like that team aspect.”

From his Bridgeport, Conn.-based studio, Katis reflects: “I had heard there was a lot of tension in the band, but to me, they seemed like best pals. All they did was joke around. Unlike a lot of rock bands, they played a lot of sports and they love rough-housing. They have this game called squat-a-friend. I had to be like, ‘Guys we are in a studio, you can break things in here.’”

Picking up where their last album left off in 2000, Circles Around the Sun is a mix of topical rockers, acoustic-flavored ballads, funkier deep-album cuts and the occasional rap moment. They tried some new sounds too: Corrigan played piano on a number, Francis wrote a song with Chris Whitley in mind and the band used a drum pad they’d picked up in Trinidad.

“They all had their distinct styles so I tried to incorporate songs by all the guys, though Chad probably wrote the most,” Katis says. Then, Owl City’s Adam Young mixed the record. They released the album independently in August through a distribution agreement with Universal.

Like Dispatch’s previous full-length, 2000’s Who Are We Living For?, Circles Around the Sun has a thick, largely electric sound that’s a shade darker then the band’s late ‘90s releases. The album’s catchy title cut is filled out by grungy guitar solos, organ swirls and a harmonica solo. Francis’ “Feels So Good” flirts with an Allman Brothers vibe, while the collaborative, groove-oriented “Not Considered” is laced with the band’s trademark harmonies. The protest song “Flag,” inspired by the Sand Creek Massacre of Native Americans in the 1800s, tackles a topic that reminds Corrigan of the Rwandan genocide. And while some of the organic pop hooks and ska-energy of the band’s earlier albums remain, Katis fleshed out the band’s instrumentation while Young gave the album a post-aughts mix.

“It was helpful knowing I have State Radio because I was able to let the project breathe and figure out what was most Dispatch-y,” Stokes says. "I would never do [the hip-hop flavored] “Not Messin’ Around” with State Radio because it is more suited for Dispatch."

If anything, age has also given the band some more perspective on their sound and none of the band members seem particularly interested in writing about relationships at this point in their career.

“We’ve grown up together so thankfully all of our experiences are kind of woven together,” Corrigan continues. “We’ve been there when family members have died or when children have died in our families. There are things happening now that didn’t happen when we were 18, 19, 20. But I think we set a good precedent back then: Our decisions need to be heart-led, as opposed to about finances or about influence.”

They are also secure enough in their friendship to show they don’t have to devote their entire life to the band. The group has plans to tour into 2013, but still intends to focus on their individual projects and charities. Then they hope to eventually reconvene for another album.

“I’d like to get weirder on the next album – a little [more] out of left field,” Stokes says. “We were a little insecure about putting some of our stranger songs on this record since it was our first one back and we wanted it to be really strong in a meat-and-potatoes way. Now that the pressure’s off, I’d like to work some West African jams and I’m interested in stretching out the songs a bit.”

Corrigan adds: "Everything is dependent on our friendships. If the friendships are good, the foundation of the band is good and you naturally want to create new material and you want to share it with your fans. It’s a very human thing, not a mechanical thing.

Though he cringes when he uses the word “reunion,” Stokes can see Dispatch regrouping every few years for the rest of their lives.

“I’m guessing when we’re in our 50s, we’ll tour less than we are now and give validity to the word ‘reunion’ when we come back in our 60s and 70s.”