Last year’s Even If It Kills Me by Motion City Soundtrack, left, is a modern-rock must.

Dan Monick

If you can’t remember how long you’ve been on tour, it’s probably been a pretty long time. Motion City Soundtrack singer Justin Pierre is in that boat, but he’s “hanging in there happily,” he says from Columbus, Ohio. The Minneapolis-based band has been busy for the past few years touring and recording some of the most melodic post-grunge pop around, mixing Pierre’s keening vocals with slamming guitars and icy keyboards that evokes pop-punk and new wave effortlessly.

“Everything Is Alright,” from 2005’s Commit This to Memory album, was their breakthrough single, one of those songs you can’t help but play seven times in a row — don’t ask how I know that — and last year’s Even If It Kills Me record is another modern-rock must — an album that sounds like a greatest-hits compilation, with every song swinging for the hit-single fences and most of them (especially “Fell In Love Without You,” “This Is For Real” and “Calling All Cops”) making it.

There’s a high-drama lyricism that makes the Motion City Soundtrack a teen favorite, and Pierre says that has its good and scary aspects. “Last night, some girl came up to me and said that she had just got off heroin. She’d only been off it for a week, but she wanted to come to the show and thank me for writing lyrics and whatever. And it was amazing, and awesome, and it was like, ‘You probably should take care of that before you do anything else.’ …

“Kids say they relate to what we write about, and that’s awesome and horrifying, because it’s good that they can relate to someone, but then the terrible part is they are going through that and I’d never wish that on someone else.”

Pierre, 32, is older than most of his audience (Is it strange? “Hell yeah”), but says that that audience is the core of what rock music is about. “They’re the most passionate about music. And then you get lazy. I know I did — in high school I saw a lot more concerts than I did when I got older. …

“What’s weird is that we get the parents too. And I’ve met people younger than me who have kids.”

As for what will happen as the band and their audience continue to age, he says, “I think a person just has to keep doing what they do. I don’t believe in pandering to an age group. Kids are smarter than that.”

Even If It Kills Me was recorded in two chunks, one produced by former Cars leader Ric Ocasek and another by Fountains of Wayne’s Adam Schlesinger and Girls Against Boys’ Eli Janney. It’s pretty hard to tell which were done by whom, and Pierre likes it that way, though he has his misgivings about the process. “I probably wouldn’t ever do that again, unless we had a lot of time in between. We just got into the swing of things, and we had to switch.”

Schlesinger and Janney “dug into every single song, and tried every single possibility until we had exhausted them all. It was a lot of fun, like kids in a playroom. Ric didn’t touch the songs at all, and I was confused during the process with him. But they both turned out amazing.”

The psychological hurt that characterized a lot of the band’s early work wasn’t going on in Pierre’s life while writing the songs for Even If It Kills Me, or so he thought. What’s going on in life doesn’t always end up in the songs, Pierre explains.

“It’s ever-changing. With our first record, who knows what was going on? Those songs came about from whatever was going on. The second record had a more condensed amount of time to write, and I was pretty [expletived] up, in every general sense, and that came through in those songs.

“And on this record, I didn’t really have anything to complain about, so I though I was writing from past history. I’d been listening to bands I listened to when I was in high school, like Pavement and Sunny Day Real Estate and Afghan Whigs and Jesus and Mary Chain, so I thought I was writing about a decade ago.

“But it turned out that it was mirroring what was going on in my life at the time. And the dissolving of a relationship right at the end of the recording of the record suddenly made sense as to what all the songs were about. I’m not trying to make it sound like it was mystical and crazy; I really don’t get it. But it’s just interesting that it turned out that way.”

While he acknowledges that “most of my songs are depressing” (actually, it’s more like they’re depressed than depressing), Pierre almost always manages to take a poke at the dramatics that his own narrative persona is going through in a particular song. “Making fun of ourselves is just our way of dealing with things.”

Pierre is celebrating 16 months of sobriety, and he says that the new focus is “blowing my mind” not just as a songwriter but “as far as just living. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so aware of what’s going on. I’m still annoying and a freak, but I think I have much more positivity. … I spent at least a decade being a negative source to everybody around me. I try to throw a positive spin on things, or at least make fun of the seriousness.”

“I’m working on this whole living-in-the-moment thing. I think most people live in either the past or the future, but I’m definitely looking forward to the next few months,” in which the band finally gets off the road and does some writing.

Motion City Soundtrack and Chiodos are at Lupo’s Heartbreak Hotel, 79 Washington St., Providence, Saturday night at 6. Tickets are $21 in advance, $23 the day of the show; reserved seats are $25. Call (401) 331-5876.

Forever Young isn’t your average cover band, or even your average tribute band. They cover the music of Neil Young, but the groups consists of some of Rhode Island’s most prolific and best-known songwriters.

It started last year when Mark Cutler, Dan Lilley and John Fuzek, along with Joanne Lurgio, closed a Rhode Island Songwriters Association gig at Stone Soup with a group acoustic cover of Young’s “Powderfinger.” Fuzek says, “I thought it would be fun to do something like that for a whole night.” Becky Chace took over for Lurgio, Pete Vendettuoli joined in and the quintet played at the Courthouse Center for the Arts.

The show was patterned after Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young’s Four Way Street album, with each member taking a lead turn, and Fuzek remembers thinking, “The place was packed. … Wow, maybe we should do it again.”

The next gig was at Lupo’s and that’s when they added the rhythm section of John Amitrano and Phil Hicks. “It’s already beyond what the whole idea was supposed to be,” Fuzek thought, but they gave it a go. “It turned out to be a blast,” Fuzek says, and “This real casual thing is now a seven-member band.”

“Technically, it’s a cover band, which is something I never wanted to do, but it’s so much fun. … We’re not trying to sound like him; we’re trying to do it our own way. And they still sound like Neil Young, but we have our own styles in there.”

It seems like a natural that these songwriters would be drawn to Young. They’re all fans, and some of them are even more than that. “We know the songs. We grew up with them,” Fuzek says. “He was an early inspiration for a lot of us. … Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young was how I got into acoustic music.”

“If I could be so bold, I feel like a kindred spirit to him,” Cutler says. “I feel like his approach to music has influenced the way I approach music. He’s a guy who cares more about the feeling and the honesty more than the technique and the scales. … He’s on the Mount Rushmore of influences.”

The band has also played at the Narrows Center for the Arts, but doesn’t play a whole lot of shows, what with all the members busy with their own gigs. Fuzek says that they’re looking to take the act regional.

“Now we rehearse,” Fuzek says. “But only if we have a show.”

“It’s still mostly for fun,” Cutler says. “It’s a labor of love.”

Forever Young is part of a lineup of local talent at the Taste of Rhode Island Festival, to be held Saturday and Sunday at the Newport Yachting Center, off America’s Cup Avenue, in Newport. They’ll play on Saturday, along with Ken Lyon and Tombstone, Far Off Place, Pat Cottrell, The Steven Chaplin Trio and Bobby Cowsill; Sunday’s bill includes The Ignitors, Johnny Carlevale and His All-Stars, Cottrell and Cowsill. Go to www.newportfestivals.com for more information.

rmassimo@projo.com