The Register-Guard; Portland, OR

During a recent in-store performance at CD World, Sam Quinn had a confession to share with the folks sprinkled around the store. The audience was perched on shelves, sitting on the floor but generally hanging on his band’s every note and utterance.

He told them he had stolen a bunch of toothpicks from a local Mexican restaurant.

“If you’re interested in a toothpick that’s mint flavored, come see me after, when we get out of the cage,” he said, referring to the store’s wooden barrier separating the band from the crowd.

Quinn is half of the songwriting and emotional force that forms the everybodyfields, an alt-country band out of Tennessee that has come west for six Oregon shows to promote a new album, “Nothing Is Okay.”

After the in-store show, Quinn and the group’s other half, who he sometimes calls “the girl,” Jill Andrews, said they have been affectionately treated like exotic animals here because they’re from Tennessee.

The toothpick banter — which like many of Quinn’s random thoughts was dispensed between sad, heart-wrenching songs — made people laugh.

“Nothing Is Okay” came out in August on Ramseur Records, the same label that represents the Avett Brothers.

Both bands are in that netherworld of genre-bending indie roots groups, although the everybodyfields’ sound is more consistent than the Avett Brothers. So it’s safer to classify the everybodyfields as country, folk-country or alt-country.

Quinn’s twang and Andrews’ crystalline earnestness, backed by pedal steel and some fiddle (on the recording, not on tour), make country a necessary word in any description. They come from the birthplace of country, where they met at a church camp when they were 19.

The band has been supporting itself with evocative, honest songs for about three years. If there were an Olympics for singing about heartbreak, these guys, now 27, would have gone pro before the games in Athens, Greece.

The band survives the breakup

The new album from the everybodyfields is primarily a conversation between ex-lovers. It is not a concept album.

Andrews and Quinn used to be a couple. They started the band as a couple. After their first CD release party for “Halfway There: Electricity and the South,” the relationship fell apart just as the success of the band had begun to build. They were determined that the band not suffer the same fate as their romance.

Many bandmates have come and gone since that 2004 breakup, and Andrews and Quinn are much less angry with each other than they were. They believe they have found their sound, and they hope bandmates Tom Pryor on pedal steel and Josh Oliver on keys will stay forever.

Now, Andrews and Quinn can sing words they never exchanged when trying to be a couple and have a functional friendship and artistic partnership.

During the interview, they playfully recounted an evening after a show in the small Eastern Oregon town of Elgin.

“I kind of got mad at you a little bit because you wanted to go to bed,” Quinn said to Andrews. “I was like, ‘I’m having a good time.’

“We were dismissing all the negative things that had gone on. We were just hanging out like old friends.”

“But then I got tired,” Andrews said. “Old friends get tired.”

“I wanted to say ‘You always do this,’ ” Quinn said in a mock-angry voice, “but then I realized that would make it sour right at the very end.”

“I’m glad you didn’t say that,” Andrews replied in her sweet, soft way of talking to her more boisterous counterpart.

They fought hard to keep the band together, even if they were not speaking to each other. Over the years, some reviewers have noted that the two get into little fights during shows. This seems to have endeared them to many fans.

On their second album, “Plague of Dreams,” the songs were sad, but they didn’t address the relationship head-on. “I think we are just getting it all out on this one,” Andrews said of “Nothing Is Okay.” “It’s been almost a healing sort of thing.”

They give dual songwriting credits on each track, but it’s more straightforward than it seems. When Andrews sings lead vocals, she is the primary songwriter; when Quinn sings a song, it’s primarily his.

They fine-tune songs and work on melodies and harmonies together.

Quinn opens the conversation with “Aeroplane,” and Andrews answers with “Lonely Anywhere.” It goes back and forth in an almost even exchange until the last two tracks, which have nothing to do with their relationship.

There’s plenty to relate to in these songs. But it’s more a feeling they get across than any specific story of what went down in their relationship.

“We don’t really talk about it,” Quinn said. “I don’t say, ‘Jill, is this song about me?’ I don’t think we ask each other questions because we don’t want to know the answer.

“I think it touches on a lot of universal themes. Everyone’s had a bad day. Most people have had a relationship that didn’t go the way they wanted it to.”

Quinn said he solves the problem of being overly confessional by encoding the real story so the songs don’t say something everyone could understand. But, he admitted, if you are really trying you could figure out a lot.

Andrews said she likes that lately the band has turned toward writing, for the most part, true songs.

“We have a lot of emotion behind, and it’s kind of cathartic for me to write a song that has a lot of feeling pushing the lyrics and the melody,” she said.