Saying that The Receders debut CD “One Night Stand” is long overdue is an understatement.

“We’d been talking about this for a number of years really,” said guitarist and singer Pete Nelson during an interview backstage at Pioneer Place on Fifth before the band’s sold-out CD release concert on April 25. “We had the material, it was just the time and effort.

The local group of rock ‘n’ roll veterans features members who have been in the music game for more than 25 years each with regional and internationally touring bands. They have been The Receders with Nelson, Jeff Lee on keyboards and harmonica, Mike Graham on bass and vocals, Bill Hatling on drums and vocals for eight years.

“This is something for me to cap off 31 years of playing live music,” Graham said.

The Receders may be a band whose name reflects its members’ receding hairlines, but these guys still have the energy and aspirations of a 20-something rock group starting to make some noise with their original tunes.

“We’re maybe not the best kept secret, but we might be the oldest in the area,” Lee said.

Old meets new

The Receders’ “One Night Stand” is soaked in good-time, classic rock flair that sounds like it was meant for vinyl but somehow managed to find its way to CD instead.

The disc includes new compositions as well as older songs, such as the title track that Nelson had been keeping in his pocket since he was 19 years old.

“That song feels to me like the birth of this record,” Lee said.

“And I wrote ‘The Blues Don’t Get Off at Night’ in 19... 85,” he added.

Lee wrote the lyrics for “These Two Hands,” a BoDeans-esque alt-country song, back then as well, but it wasn’t finished until Lee and Nelson got together with The Receders.

“(The CD) was long overdue, there’s no question about it. I feel good to have finally made that statement,” Nelson said.

Putting the band together

The Receders started with Nelson, Graham and Hatling who put the band together in 1993. This is the third inception of the band, but the name has always stuck.

“We were already past our primes, supposedly, if you’re going to do anything musically,” Hatling said. “So the name was a bit of a parody.

Hatling made the move to playing rock after playing jazz drums for years with the group Jazz One that toured Europe.

“I had just gotten kind of burnt out on playing jazz,” he said.

Graham came on board to play bass through a work connection with Hatling.

Lee remembers getting musically involved with Nelson after taking a few years off from playing. He toured internationally during the 1980s with the Minneapolis group Livingston Fury on the USO tour.

“I remember a drummer at that time, he knew Pete and we got to talking about music and he said, ‘Hey we’d like to put a band together. Do you want to come over to Pete’s house and jam with us?’” Lee recalled.

“It sounds like we were 16. ‘Hey, Pete’s putting a band together.’”

The Receders’ first show together was at the Chief Wenonga Days summer celebration in Battle Lake, which has become an annual tradition.

They started working original music into their sets about six years ago, beginning with the song “One Night Stand.”

Looking ahead

“One Night Stand” was a project years in the making, but seeds of a follow-up CD already have been planted.

“We definitely do have interests that way, but I think it’s still way too early to start thinking about another CD,” Hatling said. “We’ll see how this one goes first.”

With families and day jobs, The Receders play out about once a month at area bars, nightclubs and street dances. Not having a constant weekly gigging schedule keeps the members hungry for the next show.

“Sometimes you lug all your gear into a place and play for the night and then it’s 2 o’clock in the morning and you look at your pile of gear and you go, ‘Oh crap. I’m too old for this.’ If we played every weekend, we’d be burned out,” Lee said.

The Receders sets consist largely of cover songs, but the band plans to start spotlighting its original music more. By the crowd’s response to the originals at Pioneer Place, that’s just fine with the listeners.