First Rodeo is Tim Howe, left and Nathan Tucker.

Between 2012 and 2019, Tim Howe moved from Portland to North Carolina and back to Portland not once, but twice.

“I don’t know, I’m just a human pingpong ball, I guess,” he said with a chuckle.

No matter which side of the country he lived on, however, Howe stayed in touch with his old friend Nathan Tucker, whom he met at Lewis & Clark College in Portland.

Tucker — who moved to Philadelphia a few years ago — plays in the indie rock band Strange Ranger and he has his own project, called Cool Original, in which Howe played bass for a few years. Tucker is also a skilled producer who gets back to Portland quite often.

“It’s funny, I see Nathan more than some of my friends in town because he has pretty strong ties here,” said Howe, who was born and raised in Bend before he moved to Portland after high school in 2008. “He’s always finding ways to come out here and play shows or record someone.”

On one of those trips, Tucker played a song Howe hadn’t heard before called “I Don’t Want to Feel Another Thing.” After the show, the two got to chatting and realized they were both working on similar kinds of music at the time.

So they started passing demos and phone recordings back and forth across the internet, collaborating across the 3,000 miles that separated them.

Songs began to take shape: Country songs, folk songs, roots-rock songs, twangy songs. Songs that didn’t sound like Strange Ranger or Cool Original, or Howe’s solo project Vista House, or the band Howe shares with his brother Dylan, The Great American Commute. These were songs that clearly drew influence from classic country and alt-country, even before they assumed their final form.

“We both wanted it to have some level of country influence. We didn’t know if it was going to be a weird, sort of dusty bluegrass album or if it was going to be more like (the Rolling Stones’) ‘Exile on Main Street,’” Howe said. “But we knew that thematically we wanted to talk about old times and old friends, and we wanted it to have some level of a country sound.”

In 2021, Howe and Tucker got a chance to gather at a house on Lopez Island in Washington, where they spent four days recording drums and guitars in between having fun and enjoying life. Then, they went their separate ways but kept recording, adding pedal steel, banjo (both plucked and bowed), organ, horns and other sounds to the songs.

“It got to where we were reaching out to as many friends as we could who wanted to play on this thing or just contribute some vocals,” Howe said. “We set up a mic at a party just to capture background party sounds, because ultimately I think this album is about good times with good friends and really celebrating those moments.”

What: First Rodeo, with The Bangers and T. George

When: 7:30 p.m. Thursday

Where: Bo’s Falafel Bar, 1366 NW Galveston Ave., Bend

Cost: Free

Contact: 541-241-2074.