To classify the past three years of BR549's existence as tumultuous would be textbook understatement. Amazingly, not a trace of the band's recent upheaval is evident on their latest album, "Dog Days," their seventh overall and second for Dualtone.

After losing long-standing bassist Jay McDowell and co-founder Gary Bennett in 2002 and enduring a long period of reassessment, the Nashville band's remaining members (guitarist/lead vocalist Chuck Mead, multi-instrumentalist/vocalist Don Herron, drummer/-vocalist Shaw Wilson) decided to forge ahead with new members Geoff Firebaugh on bass and Chris Scruggs on guitar.

This new aggregation would prove to be painfully short-lived. The quintet concocted a typically impressive live set and toured the U.S. and Europe extensively, then came back and put together the band's first concept album and debut for new label Dualtone, 2004's "Tangled in the Pines," to equal amounts of acclaim.

But soon after the album's release, Firebaugh and Scruggs also exited the band, and BR549 was left a trio once again.

"Chris has moved on, he's moved down to Austin, and he's doing his own thing, which is great," says founding member Mead on holiday at his parents' Kansas home. "He's doing a record down in Tucson that I'm anxious to hear."

Having already deliberated seriously about the future of the band after the departures of McDowell and Bennett, BR549 was less conflicted about the decision to continue after the defections of Firebaugh and Scruggs.

The biggest shift came when the band elected to add only new bassist Mark Miller, leaving Mead as BR549's sole guitarist.

"Mark's really great - he sings one of the cuts on the new record, 'You Are the Queen,' which he and I wrote," says Mead. "We wrote that like a week and a half before we went in the studio. It was like, 'Let's do a song for the record,' and that's what we came up with. He's just a great talent. He's...one of the funniest guys I know. He's the Frank Gorshin of hillbilly music."

The other big decision came when the band chose to record the album that ultimately became "Dog Days" outside of their comfortable Nashville environs.

Leaving Music City behind them, the band headed down to Athens, Ga. to record in the home studio of veteran producer John Keane, whose resume includes manning the board for indie roots rock notables like R.E.M., Widespread Panic, Uncle Tupelo and the Vigilantes of Love.

"He's a great guy with a great ear. He got excellent sounds, and it's a really great sounding record," says Mead of Keane and his contributions to "Dog Days."

"We had a lot of fun doing it, just getting out of town to do it. It was kind of a little step aside for him; he's working R.E.M. and all the Widespread Panic records, so he's in a different realm from the kind of stuff we do, and we went there out of our element, too. It all just came together."

The seamless coupling of Keane and BR549 may well stand as one of the few things the band hasn't had to actively work on since their inception over a decade ago.

After the original quintet formed around Mead (who had led the Homestead Grays, a roots rock outfit) and Bennett (the organizer of an informal house band at Robert's Western World, a bar/clothing store in old Nashville's Lower Broadway area) in 1993, christening themselves after the fictional phone number of country comedian Junior Samples' used car salesman in a recurring Hee Haw sketch, the band began building an audience through a long and eventually well-attended residency at Robert's.

One of BR549's early hallmarks was the band's almost inexhaustible supply of country covers. Although the band could rip it up with the best of their alt.-country brethren, it was evident from their thrift store wardrobe and classic country set list that they felt a devout reverence for the genre's past.

The band's knowledge of country's past is the thing of legend. When they were still playing for tips at Robert's, the story is told that new country wunderkind John Michael Montgomery limoed up one evening and told Mead he'd give the band $25 for every Hank Williams song they could play. Undoubtedly, the band could have played all night, but they stopped once they'd siphoned $600 from Montgomery's wallet.

After BR549's regular appearances at Robert's garnered them local raves, it wasn't long before labels started descending on the band. Arista came away with the contract and released BR549's debut EP, "Live at Robert's," in early 1996.

Everyone from the New York Times to Playboy to Rolling Stone hailed the band as one of the freshest and most innovative groups to come out of Nashville in years.

The acclaim from their debut and the band's eponymous follow-up later the same year led to touring opportunities from every musical quarter. The band opened for The Mavericks, Junior Brown and Tim McGraw and Faith Hill on the country side and warmed up rock crowds for the Black Crowes and Bob Dylan.

By the summer of 1997, BR549 had scored a Grammy nomination, been cited on Rolling Stone's Hot List for the year and made an appearance on Late Night with David Letterman.

In order to get back to the studio to record their second full length, the band had to turn down an offer to do a four-week tour with John Fogerty.

1998's "Big Backyard Beat Show" and 1999's live "Coast to Coast" (recorded during the band's tour with Brian Setzer) were equally lauded and garnered them yet another Grammy nod, but trouble was brewing.

Behind the scenes, Arista's country division was absorbed in the Universal Music Group merger and one of the hottest country acts in America was suddenly without a label.

Sony seemingly came to the rescue, adding BR549 to the roster of their budding alt.-country imprint Lucky Dog and releasing "This is BR549" in 2001.

The band moved toward a more streamlined, contemporary country sound with the album - which may or may not have contributed to the departures of McDowell and Bennett not long after the album's release, who claimed roadburn as the reason for their exit from the band - but the label ultimately proved less fortunate than its name as Sony hedged its alt.-country bet and folded the imprint, leaving BR549 adrift once again.

"When Jay and Gary left, it ceased being one thing and started being another thing. I'm not mincing any words," says Mead. "We felt like we'd done enough that we wanted to continue playing together, but things change. It's just being able to stay in the music business and try not to have a job. I've worked long and hard not to have to work long and hard."

At this point, BR549's future was murky. While Mead, Herron and Wilson considered their options, they returned to the scene of their earliest triumphs - Nashville's Lower Broadway section - and began playing informal weekly jam sessions with the Hillbilly All-Stars, a loosely connected collective of some of Nashville's off-kilter country talent. It turned out to be a wise move.

Rejuvenated by the downtown crowd's energy and the All-Stars' passion, Mead, Herron and Wilson decided to resurrect BR549.

The first order of business was to refurbish the line-up, which they did by inviting All-Stars bassist Geoff Firebaugh and guitarist Chris Scruggs to join the band.

Firebaugh had relocated to Nashville from the Northwest where he had gained a reputation as a spirited punk and rockabilly bassist, while the teenaged Scruggs came to the group with unquestionable talent and lineage as the grandson of legendary Earl Scruggs and the son of respected musician Gary Scruggs and scrappy country singer Gail Davies.

With their line-up settled, BR549 barnstormed through the U.S. and Europe, receiving the same kind of adulation and acclaim that had greeted them early in their career. When they returned to Nashville in mid-2003, they were ready to hit the studio but had no label deal in hand.

Rather than seek out a contract, the band simply paid for its own studio time and recorded the material that coalesced into "Tangled in the Pines."

Eventually, Dualtone expressed interest in the project and signed the band, releasing the album in 2004. Returning to the eclectic urban hillbilly sound of their earlier works, BR549 once again earned great accolades for their efforts.

But just as quickly as it came, the resurrection of BR549 was cut short with the losses of both Firebaugh and Scruggs. The remaining trio had already committed to the band's continuance with the departed members hirings so the decision to carry on in the wake of this second set of defections seemed almost cavalier.

After the addition of veteran bassist Miller, the general consensus was to keep the band a quartet for the time being.

Following several months of rehearsals, BR549 was poised to head back to the studio to begin work on their seventh album, but fate intervened in the form of a job opportunity for Herron that was too good to pass up - multi-instrumentalist for Bob Dylan's 2005 tour.

"We were originally supposed to record this record back in March, but then we got sidetracked because Donnie joined Bob," says Mead. "It kind of got postponed until the dog days of August; it was an obvious name."

By the time Herron returned from Dylan duty, Mead had finished a number of songs for the upcoming album. For the first time in the band's history, they were preparing to go into the studio with material that they hadn't previously road tested.

"The songs came fresh because we hadn't been out on the road at all," says Mead. "Donnie didn't know half the songs I'd written while he was on the road. We'd been out of it, and we threw it all together at one time. It's a very in-the-here-and-now kind of record. It's the first time we've ever done that because before, we were playing 200 dates a year, so we'd been playing the songs we were gonna record for months."

After expressing a desire to do something different, Dualtone honchos Dan Herrington and Scott Robinson directed Mead to look into different producers, which led to Keane's involvement. By the time Keane became attached to the project, the general consensus was that BR549 should remain a quartet.

"We'd been talking for a long time about doing something a lot more stripped down and less like what we usually do," says Mead. "Because that's still part of what we do, and you always want to do something a little bit different and keep it interesting for everyone involved. So we didn't really set out to do anything different. We just felt like doing something different, and it came out different."

Different has been nearly a way of life for BR549 from the outset, from the band's any-gig-for-a-buck beginnings to their label troubles to personnel shufflings to shifts in the way they've made their records. Chuck Mead knows all too well that nothing stays the same for very long, and he welcomes the change that change brings.

"The only thing that doesn't change is change, and I'm not the first one to say that. It's a pretty obvious thing," says Mead. "But sometimes you forget it, and you get stuck in one mode, and you think there's never going to anything else, but that's not true. There's always going to be something else. Believe you me."