We aren’t planning anything,” says John McCauley, Deer Tick’s founder, frontman and principle songwriter, regarding the band’s Monday night show at Flatbread in Edgartown. “But everything is possible.” He laughs, clearly aware that his last trip to Martha’s Vineyard was filled with plenty of mayhem and misadventure, including missed planes and going missing.

Did you hear that hold music?” Grace Potter spurts as she’s patched through for an interview. “Disney’s flavor-of-the-day hold music Some weird reggae macho music! Wow!”

Paul Barrere is laughing. It’s 9:30 in the morning, after a show in the Poconos, and the saucy, funky guitar player is basking in the afterglow of another night being a catalyst in one of America’s longest running musical hybrids. While Little Feat has never had the commercial success of Southern California contemporaries Jackson Browne, Bonnie Raitt or the Eagles, they have remained a secret handshake among a musictocracy that truly knows the good stuff.

With a voice that embodies a dusty road at the moment when day surrenders to evening, Citizen Cope found the intersection of sensual and earthly. The Memphis-born, D.C.-raised post modern troubadour blends reggae, jazz, folk and various strains of roots music as if there are no lines dividing music — and it shows on his dusky The RainWater LP on his own RainWater Records.

In the end, it came down to a shoe box full of microcassettes, 75 interviews, two years of research and a lifetime of listening to Let It Be, Déjà Vu, Bridge Over Troubled Water and Sweet Baby James.