Calling from just north of Little Rock, Ark., Jeremy Chapman - mandolin player and lead/harmony vocalist for The Chapmans - is driving home with his bluegrass brethren to Springfield, Mo. to teach a few musical lessons.

You would think after two successful albums and an Emerging Artist of the Year award from the International Bluegrass Music Association (2002), The Chapmans wouldn't have to hold down day jobs anymore.

"We enjoy it, and it's a little extra money for car payments and stuff like that," says Jeremy, who currently teaches approximately 11 students.

He started playing mandolin when he was around nine years old. Like most kids, he admits "the hardest part was getting me to practice. That was the thing that mom and dad had to convince me about the most."

Now, the 25-year-old picker is teaching a future generation the discipline required to hone their craft.

The Chapmans officially began in April 1989 with a gig at the Bear Valley Inn in Colorado.

"The band just got together piece by piece almost by accident," says Jeremy. "It started out that dad was playing banjo, and (brother) John was playing fiddle with some friends. Then mom started on bass at that time, and I tried to play the guitar, but it was too big, so I ended up with the mandolin ... it was the only thing I could fit my hands around. Then, John discovered guitar and switched over to that."

Brother Jason plays bass.

Mom has since stepped away from the stage; still, for The Chapmans, the band is truly a family affair.

And, as Jeremy explains, this is actually a blessing - especially when it comes to singing.

"I think it has a lot of advantages," he says. "Family vocals makes phrasing almost easy because everyone talks the same, you have the same way of saying words, so when you are singing together, you can phrase things almost exactly like your brother is singing it...Being in a band together as a family you are also able to point out things that you normally wouldn't do if you weren't family...that part that you really don't like you just tell them about it. Whereas if it was a friend, you would be a little more reserved on your critique."

Jeremy's mom and dad got their sons interested in this high and lonesome music from a young age. Jeremy says that his parents were big fans of the Denver-based bluegrass band Hot Rize in the early '80s, and they started going to their shows and buying bluegrass records.

"We just kind of grew up around it, so that's probably the way we absorbed it," he says.

In 1995, The Chapmans moved from Colorado's Rocky Mountains to Missouri's Ozarks to facilitate nationwide travel. "Most of the bluegrass shows are east of Missouri, so that seemed like a more central location," Jeremy explains.

The Chapmans jumped into the national spotlight in 1998 when they won the International Bluegrass Band Championship held by the Society for the Preservation of Bluegrass Music in America.

Combined with the critical acclaim of the band's first independent album, "Love's Gonna Live Here," the win paved the way for The Chapmans to sign a record contract with independent roots and bluegrass label Pinecastle Records.

"Simple Man," released in April, is the band's third album for Pinecastle. Produced by Rhonda Vincent's brother Darrin, it showcases a natural evolution from 1999's "Notes From Home" and 2001's "Follow Me," which established The Chapmans as rising bluegrass stars.

The Chapmans charged into the bluegrass scene at exactly the right time since the music has seen an increase in popularity in recent years.

"Everybody has seen a big resurgence in the last few years with a lot of the bigger country artists like Dolly Parton, the Dixie Chicks ... all those country groups doing some bluegrass albums," Jeremy explains. "Also 'O Brother, Where Art Thou?' gave a big boost to bluegrass."

"I think part of it is that in the past people had a stereotype of bluegrass as more of an unsophisticated type of music," he continues. "Now that they are hearing it, they see that there is some real sophistication to it like with Alison Krauss and Nickel Creek, and they are realizing that there are great musicians playing it, and it's not quite as hillbilly as they imagined it." There's nothing hillbilly about "Simple Man," and don't let the title fool you either since the record was not so simple to make - it actually took four years.

According to Jeremy, taking this extra time was definitely worth it. "It's been four years since our last album, and we have spent two years of actually working on this one," he says. "We have been going through demos the whole four years. Once we started rehearsing with Darrin and we started laying tracks, it's been almost two years."

"Part of it was knowing that it had been four years, and we wanted to make sure that it topped the last album. Also, we built our own studio so that we had the opportunity to spend more time on it than we normally would have if we were paying for studio time every day. We were able to record something, then listen to it for a couple days and see how it felt, then go back and fix some of the parts and spend more time on it like we would have liked on other albums, but just couldn't afford to do without owning the studio."

"We still recorded the basic instrument tracks in Nashville, while the overdubs and vocals, we did all that in our studio."

"The reason we did the tracks in Nashville is that our studio is not laid out big enough right now for all of us to cut live together, and we wanted to do that because you get a much better feel for the music when everyone is playing together," Jeremy continues.

"Then, when we had that down to where we liked it, we took all that home and could rest a little while, and when we had to do overdubs, we would work on those all the time. The other thing we noticed on some of our other albums, if someone wasn't feeling good vocally one day, you still had to sing your parts just because studio time is running. Whereas when we had the studio if someone woke up and their voice just wasn't working right we could say, 'well let's just try again tomorrow' so we could get the best out of it."

The Chapmans were fortunate to have Gary Paczosa mix "Simple Man" to get the best out of the studio sessions. The veteran recording engineer has worked on six Grammy-winning projects, including Nickel Creek's "This Side," the Dixie Chicks' "Home" and Parton's "The Grass is Blue."

Jeremy explains that working with Paczosa was one of the highlights of the recording sessions. "He gets a sound in the studio in his mix that is pretty incredible, so that was a dream of ours to work with him," he says.

"Simple Man" features some old-time favorites, notably George Jones' "Sometimes You Just Can't Win" and the late Jimmy Martin's "You'll Be A Lost Ball."

However, the majority of the songs are new finds. Choosing songs for the new record was also no simple task for The Chapmans - these bluegrass boys began the process with some 3,200 demos to sort through.

"Each album that does better you start getting more and more demos from songwriters," Jeremy says. "On this one, even the record label submitted to various publishing companies telling them that we were going to do a new album, asking for CDs. So for a while, every week we would be getting a big box with 40 different CDs in it. We were spending all the time we were on the road driving from show to show just listening to different demos and putting them in a pile of: ones we didn't think would work, ones that had potential and others that we really wanted to listen to again. We kept trying to narrow that down a little at a time to a manageable level. We finally got it down to like 80 songs, then had to whittle that down to the 12 that made the album." Choosing a dozen songs from several thousand is a daunting task for any music aficionado, so how do The Chapmans decide when a song has what it takes to make it on to one of their albums?

According to Jeremy, it's often the words that speak to them first. "Lyrics that tell a story throughout the song," he says. "We would have some that had a really cool melody, but lyrically just didn't do much. We also got a lot of songs that were done as country demos...recorded originally for a country artist, and we really couldn't hear a bluegrass band doing it, so we had to change up the chord progression a little bit and mess around with it...try it one way, then another, to something we could work out."

The lone original The Chapmans worked out is "Pickle-Flavored Ice Cream" - a barn stompin' instrumental romp, which Jeremy explains was inspired by a young fan.

"We did this craft show tour with a bunch of different acts, and one of them is a magician and his wife, and they have this five-year old son," he says. "We have known him since he was born pretty much, and he would always tell everybody that he loved pickled flavored ice cream just to see what type of reaction he would get from them...he would say 'I love pickled flavored ice cream', and we would go 'Oh gross!'"

Vincent raised the bar for quality and musical craftsmanship on "Simple Man" without compromising The Chapmans' artistic vision. "Working with Darrin was a big plus because we got a lot of ideas from him vocally and instrumentally," Jeremy says.

Other musical ideas came from Union Station guitarist Ron Block who plays backing guitar on three songs: "The Photograph," "Runaway Kind" and "Sometimes You Just Can't Win." For Jeremy, having this multi-talented instrumentalist contribute to "Simple Man" was one of the other highlights.

"He's a hero of all us in the band," he says. "We went over to his studio and recorded his parts. He's a great instrumentalist, and it was really cool to watch his process of how he recorded in the studio."

Singer Sonya Isaacs, guitarist Rob Ickes, and fiddlers Stuart Duncan, Andy Leftwich and Aubrey Haynie also lent their talents.

"We are interested in seeing how this new CD turns out," Jeremy says. "We are all really proud of it. Now we get a chance to find out what everybody else thinks."

Judging by the early accolades in the month and a half since the disc's release, many think that it's a finely tuned bluegrass record. "Simple Man" debuted at number four on the bluegrass Billboard charts.

With their work in the studio finished, The Chapmans are now on the road, giving their fans across the country a taste of these songs live, averaging about 140 shows each year. And, despite this full tour schedule and "Simple Man's" early success, The Chapmans won't quit giving music lessons just yet.