Broken Down Guitars (Gary Calicott/Submitted photo)

Ask Broken Down Guitars vocalist and guitarist Stacie Johnson about her songwriting process, and she just laughs.

“There is no process. The train comes rolling down the track, and you just sort of put your ear down to it and you’re like, ‘Oh, I think it’s coming; oh (crap), I gotta get some paper and a guitar really fast because something’s coming through,’” Johnson said during a recent band practice at a house in Bend. “And you’ve just gotta be there; you gotta be ready for the train to hit the station.”

If the train rolls up at an inopportune time — say, when Johnson is in the hospital at 3 a.m. with a 104-degree fever — she rides it out. That’s how she wrote soul-rock ballad “Never Leave,” the second track on Broken Down Guitars’ upcoming second album “Everything You Need.”

“I was pushing the nurse button — I had pneumonia and I was in the hospital overnight,” Johnson said. “(The nurse) comes in: ‘What do you need?’ ‘Paper and a pen!’ I’m not kidding. And I wrote ‘Never Leave,’ and I think that’s like the most heartfelt sort of love song that I’ve ever written. So you have to have a 104-degree fever to write a love song in my brain, apparently.”

Clearly, Johnson doesn’t like to force songwriting. Although, she’s not averse to having another member of the band push her to find inspiration.

“We kind of wrote ‘Hot Action’ that way,” said guitarist A.J. Blum. “We sort of just sat down one day and said, ‘We’re gonna write this kind of song,’ and we did and it came out really well.”

“We wanted to write a funk song,” Johnson added. “And I was like, ‘A.J., I can’t just write funk songs; I gotta write whatever song I can write, man.’ And he’s like, ‘Keep it funky,’ and I’m like, ‘This is what’s coming out, I can’t change it.’”

Johnson, Blum and the rest of Broken Down Guitars — lead guitarist Conner Bennett, drummer and vocalist Kent Howes, bassist Aaron-Andre Miller, keyboardist Stephanie Miller and percussionist/rapper Aaron Chambers, aka MC Mystic — will drop “Everything You Need” at a free album release show at The Capitol on Saturday.

The show will help kick off another big year for BDG. In addition to more out-of-town gigs, the band is planning to launch a music festival Aug. 5 and 6 at Summer Lake Hot Springs, dubbed the Broke Down Soak Down (so far BDG and fellow local faves Corner Gospel Explosion have confirmed). Tickets, which cost $60, are currently available from BDG at shows, and will eventually be sold online, Johnson said.

The 11-song “Everything You Need,” featuring songs written by Johnson, Blum, Howes and Aaron-Andre Miller, comes three years after the band’s debut album “Passports” and barely a year after some of the biggest lineup changes in the band’s history.

Johnson and Blum formed Broken Down Guitars in 2007 out of a jam session in Johnson’s living room. The duo debuted at an open mic night at M&J’s Tavern, and soon after began playing around town and adding members. In 2012, the then five-piece band won local battle of the bands Last Band Standing, earning enough recording time in a Eugene studio to bang out “Passports.”

The lineup featured on “Passports” — Johnson, Blum, Howes, bassist Matt McConnell and violinist Lilli Worona — was, by Blum’s reckoning, “the Broken Down Guitars that everybody sort of got to know at Last Band Standing.” The band played with a few other bassists, but the big shakeup came last March when Worona left the band.

“We played Les Schwab (Amphitheater) last summer, and just that gig (before) Lilli said bye-bye,” Johnson said. “We’re like, ‘But we gotta play Les Schwab.’ And we’re like, ‘… We gotta find some people to play Les Schwab with us.’ But by no means is this like thrown together; it was all good timing on finding these amazing people.”

By April, the Millers and Bennett had joined the group. Newest member Chambers only features on two songs on “Everything You Need”: rollicking anthem “Sorry For Partyin’” and loping ballad “Not Alone.” The local rapper, a veteran of Matisyahu’s former Bend band Soulfori (which also included Aaron-Andre Miller), had been dating Johnson for about a year and doing sound for the band before joining up.

“I think with this group of people that we have come the closest to what we have been trying to do,” Johnson said. “I think this is definitely the closest we’ve come to whatever the spark is, the dream.”

BDG has never been a band to shy away from a jam, and the new lineup has accentuated these tendencies within the group. The album release show should offer ample opportunities for jamming: Worona will return for five songs, and horn players Jim Goodwin and Travis Denmark will join the group on loan from Hobbs the Band (Goodwin helped produce the album at Hobbs the Band’s Sisters headquarters, The Blue Keep).

“I think (Stacie) and I have always had the vision that this was gonna be somewhere in the jam-slash-Americana genre,” Blum said. “And in the past we’ve sort of had different iterations that were a little more indie, a little more country. But yeah, this is a rock band.”

— Reporter: 541-617-7814, bmcelhiney@bendbulletin.com