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Ideally, the act of music-making is a participatory enterprise: a shared experience between the performer and the audience where, in the best of circumstances, the line between the two is pleasantly vague. The singer-songwriter steps down and winds his or her way through an audience that sings along as it spills onto the stage, weaving limbs and clapping hands in a swaying, dancing mass of interconnected humanity. It’s the walrus manifesto: “I am he as you are he as you are me” and all that choral togetherness.

Anyone who has experienced a real live walrus (musical, not zoölogical) can attest to the magic of the audience-as-performer/performer-as-audience moment, the casual commingling and instant camaraderie of strangers shouting to one another in tones off-key yet doubtlessly heartfelt. The band steps back, the stage mics cut out, and the expected silence is, instead, filled with hundreds if not thousands of voices joined together like elementary penguins singing Hare Krishna. It’s a modern extension of the country church and the campfire guitar circle, the local pub and the vaulted music hall—traditional spaces of communal celebration and familial comfort where everyone knows the words and no one feels embarrassed in adding his or her own voice to the mix.

In short, it feels like home.

Yet achieving such walrus-worthy levels of audience participation is a rare feat in a small setting, as the tusked wonder typically requires either an easily-learned (and oft-repeated) chorus or an inordinately large supply of dedicated fans with decent memories to call it forward. Arguably, the truest walruses are born as spontaneous sing-along-ularities in the sweaty, microcosmic furnace of the pit. There’s a necessary chaos to the process, and recreating the musical collective consciousness experience in a pre-planned, sterile studio environment would seem to be a near-impossibility. Absent the audience, it’s a guaranteed no-go. So, how is that the folksy, Portland-based pop-rockers known as Jared Mees and the Grown Children managed to do just that?

How, indeed. You could argue that there is chaos inherent to the group’s music, evident in both their sprawling lyrics and their complex arrangements, not to mention the fact that the quasi-collective is comprised of a constantly-rotating cast of characters. First and foremost, there’s Jared Mees, the singer-songwriter whose lauded solo debut, If You Wanna Swim w/the Sharks, dropped back in 2007. Along with his wife Brianne, Mees also happens to co-own and -operate Tender Loving Empire, the Willamette Week-dubbed “frankenbusiness” that operates as a record label, publishing imprint, print shop, art gallery, book/record/consignment store, performance space, and apparel boutique.

Joining Mees for the Grown Children’s debut full-length—the whimsically-titled Caffeine, Alcohol, Sunshine, Money—is a motley crew of musicians both classically trained and self-taught. There’s percussion by Ezra Holbrook (formerly of The Decemberists and currently of Dr. Theopolis), strings and arrangements by Jordan Dykstra (VP of Marriage Records); keys, accordion, and whatall from Finn Riggins’ Eric Gilbert; lovely backing vocals by Megan Spear, plus an ensemble cast of instrumental and vocal supporters duly named in the album’s liner notes. Not to mention the various (and seemingly seasonal) touring incarnations of the Grown Children, wherein Mees and Spear seem to be the only consistent performers.

So, there’s chaos—rather, amicable disarray—and there’s something of a crowd built-in to the Grown Children. But is it enough to make a walrus?

Maybe not on its own, but once you take into account the Grown Children’s collective instrumentation and Mees’s own homespun songwriting, built as it is upon conversational narratives and stream-of-consciousness poetics, there is no doubt that Caffeine, Alcohol, Sunshine, Money affects an infectious whit and boundless exuberance that is both lovable and virtually guaranteed to get the audience singing and dancing along.

But, in the words of the great LeVar Burton, don’t take my word for it: take a listen to “Bees”, the opening track from Caffeine, Alcohol, Sunshine, Money, and hear for yourself. Accompanied by rumbling bass, alternating picked and bowed strings, steady snare and tom, washboard rhythms, twanging banjo, and acoustic strums, Mees and Spear trade off rhyming couplets both dour and self-deprecating. It’s a charming mix of slice-of-life autobiography and random musings, hopelessly optimistic even in its direst moments:

“‘Cause the house has the odds—they’re a hundred to one that you will decay in your tracks and go blind as you stare at the sun just making its rounds and increasing the dread that each morning you leave slightly more of yourself in the bed. But the radio’s on, and it’s turning my heart into gold, and the guilt I once had is gone, it’s been replaced by the fear of dying before I get old now.”

“Bees” is a pretty fair introduction to the album, both in tone and in presentation. The sing-along aspect—Mees and Spear intermittently backed by shouts from the rest of the band and the in-studio choir—is present throughout Caffeine, Alcohol, Sunshine, Money, though it is remarkably unconstrained by a singular chorus or refrain. Rather than relegate such all-together singing to one part of any given song, Mees & co. follow a fairly pre-set (and easily followed) rhythm and rhyme scheme, infrequently punctuating their extended verses with the brief wha-oh’s of “In the Fall” and the repeated phrases of “The Tallest Building in Hell”. Yet even those are mere way-markers compared to your typical verse-chorus-verse pop arrangements, as the back-up vocals from the Grown Children tend to offer line-specific, mid-verse emphasis rather than simply bolster a song’s chorus. Sure, it’s still a straightforward and easily recognizable method—musical tropes are designed to be quickly learned and followed by the audience—but it bears noting that Jared Mees and the Grown Children are more inclined to leave a melodic trail for the listener to follow than to lyrically hold his or her hand the entire way.

But this does not mean that Jared Mees and the Grown Children are immune to the sirens’ call of a catchy chorus. Hardly, as both the existential crises of “Oh No Oh My God” and the mid-transit metaphors of “Excellent Time” make excellent use of lyrical repetition, whether in crying out for “sweet surrender” to “satisfy my soul” or in celebrating the “hope of an uninterrupted life” and the “love of two continuous lines stretching from this to the other side”. Then there are the somber, violin-lead ramblings of “Trampling Daisies”, where the frequently revisited title serves as a touchstone for Mees’s meandering thoughts on the need and purpose of memory.

Another common theme for the album is Mees’s sentimentality, though it must be said that the Grown Children work awfully hard to avoid appearing either sappy or maudlin. Take, for instance, the upbeat rhythms of “Strong Black Coffee”: the track’s stimulating six-string strums and nuanced strings promote even more of Mees’s thoughts on life and the never-ending search for meaning, only to seamlessly segue into the country-fried rhythms, twinkling keys, and acknowledged futility of “Wettin’ Down the Dirt”. That the two songs flow so easily into and out from one another makes their thematic contradictions all the more engaging.

But it’s not all deep thoughts and existential crises. Blatantly namedropping a hometown venue, “Slabtown (Friday Night)” offers the most rocking turn on all of Caffeine, Alcohol, Sunshine, Money, as the song’s driving riffs, droning keys, and splashy percussion provide an incredibly danceable backbeat while Mees repeatedly asks the listener to tell him, “Whatcha doing on a Friday night wearing pants that fit so tight so far from home?” Honestly, it sounds a lot less creepy on the album than it reads on paper.

Cooling off from the frenzy of “Slabtown”, penultimate track “Sunday Lord” is a steady-strumming, kick-thumping story about Mees’s heritage, waxing wistful on his extended family of workaholic farmers and dedicated small-town bankers. In a similar (and albeit more convoluted) ode to childhood innocence and its inevitable loss, “10:26” builds from a simple three-piece of guitar, bass, and drums to a string-aided ba-da-ba-da-ba shout-along outro that is wholly affecting in its earnestness.

While “10:26” may mark the official end to the album, there’s still more to hear. After some random home audio recordings (seemingly culled from a surprise birthday party), Mees takes up his guitar for an untitled solo piece, a touching song about the constant trials of love and marriage, replete with hard times and uncertainty and the crippling pain of loss. “Why, oh why do we come so fast and disappear”, questions Mees, “Where, oh where do we go after this, after here?”

Of course, neither Mees nor the listener can provide any fitting answer to so deep a question, effectively ending the album on a note that, while bittersweet, feels wholly appropriate. After all, Caffeine, Alcohol, Sunshine, Money could very well double as a laundry list of quick-fix highs and lows: caffeine to crash, buzz to bender, sunshine to sunburn, and wealth to debt. Though its rough-and-tumble revelry is hardly an exegesis on excess, let alone a call for moderation, Caffeine, Alcohol, Sunshine, Money is a nice exploration of life’s ups and downs, taking each as they come and learning some hard lessons along the way. That the listener can relate to all of this should come as no surprise—really, it’s just one more songwriter’s take on the quintessential human story—but the fact that Jared Mees and the Grown Children have made all that suffering and heartache into something worth celebrating is nothing short of wonderful.

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