In The Moment

The members of Dispatch, who have known each other since their teenage years, fell back in to friendships quickly after reuniting.

The music takes a little more time, says Chad Urmston, who alternates between being vocalist, percussionist, guitarist and bassist for the band. For better or for worse, Dispatch knows the process.

The band, which toured almost nonstop in the late 1990s and early 2000s, went on hiatus for nearly 10 years.

Charity gigs and other one-off shows brought them together periodically, but it wasn’t until 2011 that the New Englandbased band announced a full slate of tour dates and new material.

Both of those things continued in 2012 and 2013.

The band’s current tour kicked off May 28 in Boise, Idaho, and visits the Wakarusa music festival tonight as the headlining set among almost three dozen other performances today. Less than a week later, the band will release a new live album, “Ain’t No Road to Cleveland, Vol. 1,” which was recorded during the course of the 2011 reunion tour.

Urmston says the band practiced for 30 days for the three 2007 shows in Madison Square Garden that were recorded and later released as “Dispatch: Zimbabwe,” with proceeds helping residents of the impoverished nation.

Each subsequent tour took the band some time to prepare for, says Urmston by phone before the kickoff show in Boise. The band still comes together for at least a week before the tour, and themembers take that time to remember the songs they’re so used to playing.

“We really needed that practice time,” he says.

Urmston and his colleagues - Brad Corrigan on vocals, guitar, drums, percussion and harmonica and Pete Heimbold on vocals, bass and guitar - might not need so much time if they didn’t care so much about the live show. Urmston considers Dispatch to be alive-first band, and the group needs perfection on stage to pull that off. Watching videos of the 2011 reunion tour, Urmston says it looks like the band is thinking while they play - thinking about the next note, the next lyric, the next something. Instead, if things are going right, the band just knows.

“We try to find that spot where we’re in the zone,” says Urmston.

That comes in sharp contrast to the band’s first run. By the time the group was playing its final shows together in 2002, the nonstop schedule had gotten the better of the band and the friendships therein.

“I remember thinking, ‘If this is the last time I get on stage with these guys, that’s OK,’” Urmston says. Distance away from his bandmates helped him appreciate what the group had done - pretty great accomplishments for an independent folk/reggae/ pop band that rarely made the radio.

Times have changed, however. The musicians are all 10 years older now, and many have children to take care of when not on the road. As a result, the recent comeback tours have been pretty limited affairs. The 2013 tour includes only 14 stateside dates, among them the one tonight at theFranklin County music festival. Urmston believes it will be the band’s first appearance in Arkansas.

With the band’s 2012 release of new material, “Circles Around the Sun,” nearing the end of its life cycle, Dispatch has to decide what’s next. For a group now accustomed to its space, it might mean Arkansas fans are among the last to see them for a bit.

“We might go away for a little while,” Urmston says.