Musicianship, reality and goofiness.

Now there’s a rock’n’roll trifecta suggests Vinnie Amico, as he offers his impressions of why people are drawn to moe., that lovable quintet with a lower case moniker and fans whose affection is decidedly upper case.

“Some of our songs are goofy, which people like, and they speak of real life, which they like,” says drummer Amico and, oh, yes, he adds, the musicianship is solid.

While, in still another quirk, moe. may insist on tagging a period onto the end of their name, there is none on their creative journey. Bring on the hyphens and commas, as in an ongoing continuation of their musical exploration.

You want blues-rock? They can play it.

How about country-rock? Yes, they can get down with the best of them.

Jazz? Ditto.

Funk? Check.

The real beauty comes when they wed all those genres and more, moving effortlessly over the artistic borders, no passport offered, none expected, as they make a whole greater than the sum of its parts.

Rolling Stone is among the most recent of prestigious publications to notice, rendering a rave four-star review for moe.’s latest and fifth studio album, “Dither.” “For a so-called ‘jam band,’ moe. have a gift for brevity,” writes David Fricke. “In its gleaming rigor, ‘Dither’ is not the antithesis of noodle rock; it is the way forward.”

Before they can point the way, though, there is a dilemma to solve for the band that emerged from Buffalo in 1991.

”It’s a critically acclaimed album, so we want to have people actually hear it,” explains Amico laughing. “We’ll tour and try to get some songs played on the radio and try to sell some records but we don’t know how to go about doing it. Triple A radio (formats) have added it, but most people haven’t heard it.”

That’s where getting lumped under the “Jam Band” umbrella can be both a good news/bad news situation, he suggests. “It’s a good thing in that it puts you in front of a large crowd of people right off the bat. Where it kind of hurts lately is we have been trying to get our songs on radio and we are known as a ‘Jam band.’

”You get some blockheaded music director on a radio station who says ‘It doesn’t fit our format. It’s a jam band.’ He won’t listen to it. He won’t play it. How the hell does he know if their audience is gonna like it?“

Perhaps it will be reviews like those in Rolling Stone that will spread the good word.

“Too many of moe.’s peers confuse the art of jamming with the easy fun of spinning out over a springy rhythm and a locked chord progression,” Fricke writes. “…moe. have figured out how to integrate song and sprawl. The result is muscular guitar pop with room for rambling.”

Amico believes that is an on-the-mark observation. Songwriting is the key, the core, he says.

“If you listen to our albums, most of them have songs and not a lot of jamming or long stuff on them,” he says.

”Our live album has a 25-mintue song. It’s obvious we can jam. We actually have songs, not just space around solo jams.

”The songs can be five-minute sort of pop songs or stretched out into 15-20 minute jazz numbers. We have songs and jams based around the songs, rather than the other way around. That connects with a lot of people. They connect with the songs and what they are saying and meaning.”

“Dither” is probably moe.’s best album, he says. “It sounds better than anything we’ve done. The songwriting is pretty focused and the album is pretty cohesive.”

Amico says everyone contributes in the creative process. “It’s usually riffs that we work into songs,” he explains.

“Dither” came out of a progressive artistic dinner of sorts, the result of recording sessions the band taped in four parts of the country. “All of a sudden we came to the end of the year and it was like ‘Wow! We have like 16 tunes on tape.’ We went back and listened and it was ‘Wow! We have a lot of good songs on tape.’ We took the songs and started working on an album. What started out as an idea of having some tunes on tape came out to be one of our best works.”

Though the basic recording was done in different locations, they employed the same engineer. They also tried different miking techniques, a lot of background percussion and, on a couple of tunes, what Amico calls “old-school drum machines.”

“We just tried a bunch of different things. It was a lot of fun, especially when it worked,” he says, laughing. “Some of the stuff didn’t and it got trashed.”

The band has one or two songwriting sessions a year. “We lock ourselves into a room, with as much time as we have,” Amico explains.

He hopes that effort will result in continued growth for the band. “Our shows have been getting bigger and bigger and selling out more and more,” he says. “I hope we can keep going forward.”

The music of moe. seems to be speaking to an increasingly varied age group. “Our audience is starting to get younger, and we have a die-hard following of a lot of old taping Deadheads, and there are a lot of college kids. It’s kind of like a three-tiered crowd. We like people to get something out of our live shows. We perform over half a year.”

There is considerable energy at the shows, he says.

”Oh, yes, that’s the thing that sets us apart from a lot of jam bands kind of: the rock factor. We don’t just noodle around and play these mellow jams. We go out there and kind of slam and bring each of the jams way, way up, overboard almost. We try to put it in your face, every tune and every show.”

When it gets down to it, he just loves to play, Amico says. “I love the crowd response. The bigger the crowd gets, if we can get them in those jams and we can hear the crowd louder than the band it’s a pretty wild feeling.”

Telepathy comes into play on sage too, he says. “There is a telepathy thing with the band. We have a set list and all, but once we have the segue into a song you don’t know where you are going or how you will get to the next song. We don’t rehearse that. A song my start at 4/4 and go to a slow 7/8, and we think to ourselves, ‘How the hell are we gonna get there?’ When it works wow! That’s what keeps an audience coming – not playing perfect every night. People are all right with that, thank God.”

A key to a good jam, he says, is everyone in a band has to listen to whatever everyone else is doing. “You are improvising. Everybody is kind of doing their own thing. If everybody is listening you can play off what everybody else is doing. There are great musicians out there that can’t jam. They’ve never been put in a situation where they aren’t playing the same things all the time.”

Music remains a very large part of his life, Amico adds. “I was brought up around it and started playing real young,” he says. “I would like to continue doing this until I’m able to retire. Hopefully we’re not even halfway there.”