Lotus in Bloom

Local jam band Blue Lotus is about to release their third album, A Thousand Other Things — their concert at WOW Hall on June 15 will be a CD release party — and singer-rhythm guitarist Brandelyn Rose says the band will be giving listeners something a bit different this time.

“The album has 12 songs, but what’s hard for us is we tend to be improvisational,” Rose says. “We usually have songs that go anywhere from 12 to 20 minutes long, so for us it was a challenge to try and capture that in a studio album.”

Previous releases have included a variety of sounds, with tracks like “On the Road With You” taking borderline honky-tonk country music and introducing it to rock ‘n’ roll, while “Upside Down” feels more like the traditional epic jam category, with time changes and dizzying guitar solos and drumming. “Mama Freight Train” is unstoppable funk, and once the dance party gets started on the energetic “Dancing Duck,” fuhgeddaboudit. Their trademark 12-minute-plus jams, however, would demand a lot of airtime.

“We needed the songs to be radio-friendly, so we had to get ‘em down to under six minutes, which was really hard to do,” Rose says with a laugh. “It was an interesting process for us, trying to rein it in. We had to do really short solos and verses, so it was more focused on the content and musicality than the jams, but I think we still give people a pretty good glimpse of our sound despite the shorter, tighter format.”

As for the concert itself, Rose says the show will be four hours long, so make sure you bring your dancing shoes!

Blue Lotus plays 8 pm Saturday, June 15, at WOW Hall; $8 adv., $10 door.