Sean and Sara Watkins bring ‘Family Hour’ show home to Largo on Oct. 2

From the beginning, musical siblings Sean and Sara Watkins intended their monthly Watkins Family Hour performances to be everything the music business as usual isn’t.

No touring, no recording, no fixed set lists. Only a revolving roster of performers without any insistence on tight, meticulously rehearsed tunes.

Instead, spontaneity would reign, and that’s the way it’s been since 2002, as the two San Diego musicians whose tastes run from avant-bluegrass, country and folk to artisanal rock, jazz and pop have held court in the cozy confines of Largo, first at its original location on Fairfax Avenue and in recent years in its larger home at the Coronet Theatre on La Brea.

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“I’m a firm believer that if you’re in one band, you really need to be in two,” Sara Watkins, 34, said over a beer recently at a favorite Echo Park pub, where she discussed the journey that’s transformed her and her brother, now 38, from wunderkind members of edgy San Diego bluegrass trio Nickel Creek (with mandolinist Chris Thile) through their latest project, the Watkins Family Hour.

“The Family Hour has been the No. 2 band for the longest time, and this summer it gets to be No. 1, which is really fun,” she said of the group that also includes singer-songwriter Fiona Apple, keyboardist-songwriter Benmont Tench from Tom Petty’s Heartbreakers, former Lone Justice drummer Don Heffington and ex-Soul Coughing bassist Sebastian Steinberg.

She’s was referring to the recent release of their album-length debut, “Watkins Family Hour,” and the band’s two-month tour covering 17 cities, including a return home for the latest of their regular gigs at Largo on Friday.

“We’d always thought of the Family Hour as the anti-touring gig,” Sean said. “Everyone was on the road doing their normal day jobs -- where you have to do it every night, really well and rehearse, and you’re traveling. Here, we’re in our hometown, and we’re not playing anything we’ve practiced. It’s very loose, and it gave us some freedom. Because of that, we’d never wanted to record and maybe mess up the vibe somehow.”

Ironically, in the effort to give themselves breathing space, they’ve organically spawned a new group.

“There’s a camaraderie among us that’s gotten pretty strong over the last five to seven years,” Sara said. “Since Largo moved to Largo at the Coronet [in 2008], it’s been a pretty consistent band. It’s been these guys. Before that it was fairly flexible. It was different every week.”

Like other habitues of Largo -- musicians as well as comedians -- the Watkins siblings often pop in for their colleagues’ gigs: Largo regular Jon Brion’s freewheeling shows, jazz pianist-composer-arranger Brad Mehldau’s performances, and surprise appearances by any number of high-profile celebs -- even Kanye West.

Largo also nurtured a sense of community the siblings have found hard to come by, except for the characteristically friendly bluegrass festivals they played on the way up with Nickel Creek.

“I remember skipping out of a session once when were were making ‘Why Should the Fire Die?’” Sara said of Nickel Creek’s 2005 album, glancing at Sean for a nod of confirmation. “I felt totally ragged, totally worn out and tired, so I decided to steal an hour for myself and going to Largo and seeing four songs of Paul Brady, one of my favorite Irish musicians, and just being so renewed…. It was so refreshing and it felt like a renewed reminder of why we do this.”

Over the last half a dozen years, the Family Hour show, while still including a variety of guests such as Jackson Browne, organist-producer Booker T. Jones, actor-singer John C. Reilly and L.A. indie rock band Dawes, yielded the lineup featured on the new album.

A friend -- producer-engineer Sheldon Gomberg -- suggested they record some of the numbers they returned to over the years in the Family Hour shows.

That led to the album, a collection of songs that cross a broad swath of music, from Texas songwriter Robert Earl Keen’s “Feelin’ Good Again” to the Grateful Dead’s “Brokedown Palace” and “The King of the 12 Oz. Bottles,” which was written by L.A. punk band Fear frontman Lee Ving.

Although Sara is the primary singer, everyone gets a shot at the microphone. Sean sounds fittingly Dylan-esque on their version of his “Going Going Gone,” and Apple steps forward in a duet with Sara on “Where I Ought to Be.” Tench sings Saunders Montgomery’s “Prescription for the Blues,” and Steinberg takes the lead on Dickey Lee Lipscomb’s country classic “She Thinks I Still Care.”

They opted for outside material rather than original songs because, Sean said, “that seemed to be a good way to distinguish this from our other projects.”

On tour, Sara said they mix songs from the album with additional numbers, and those vary from show to show. In each of the 17 cities, they’ve worked in new songs and different guests representing “our friends from that town and our influences from that town.”

Among the highest-profile stops on the tour, the band played Lincoln Center in New York City, after a run of three nights at the City Winery in Manhattan, and served as house band for a multi-artist 50th anniversary salute to Bob Dylan’s 1965 landmark album “Highway 61 Revisited.”

“There’s a lot of lyrics on that record,” Sara noted with a smile.

On tour, the shows have been “half-planned and then half-open to what’s going to happen,” Sean said. “We have a plan that we can fall back on, but a lot of times stuff happens that you have to go with, and that’s again part of the beauty of why we started doing this.

“It’s fun to be playing a song you’re not really sure about, with people who are equally unsure, but who are listening and trying to figure it out,” he said. “You feel very aware, and very alive.”

Added Sara, “I think the spur-of-the-moment thing is really important… We want to represent the material that’s on the CD, but we’re not glued to it. We’re proud of it, we celebrate it with the audience, but we also don’t want it to get too polished.

“It’s kind of life giving in a lot of ways.”

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