Yore, a brand-new KC act, bows Friday

The basement of Abby Livingston-Shelburne’s Kansas City, Kansas, home is nothing special. Whitewashed stone walls, cool concrete floors, a fine dust atop the washer and dryer. The lighting is dim, the invitation to creativity seemingly minimal.

But singer-guitarist Livingston-Shelburne and the rest of her band, Yore — singer-guitarist Jonny Riede, bassist Alex Leonard, drummer Nick Talley and singer-keyboardist Kelli Snyder — are accustomed to these aesthetics. The five practice here at least twice a week, sometimes more.

And on this particular Thursday night, as the band runs through a set of intricate folk-pop songs, the mundane setting falls away. The band launches into “It’s Lost,” and four layered voices — Livingston-Shelburne and Riede, the primary singers, with harmonies from Snyder and Talley — turn a run-through into a haunting. Riede’s tenor, fragile and tremulous, threatens to crack against the sweet springtime warmth of Livingston-Shelburne’s voice. Snyder’s trumpet accentuates that tension.

“It’s Lost” isn’t very cheery, but it’s big in a way that far transcends what Riede envisioned when he scratched out its skeleton two years ago. Yore hadn’t yet come together then. Livingston-Shelburne was pursuing a degree at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, and Riede would regularly exchange songs and fragments with her.

“We’ve been best friends since we were 16,” Riede says. (They’re both 26 now.) He and Livingston-Shelburne were also in the band the Cherry Tree Parade together, from the band’s inception in 2008 until she moved to Texas in 2009. “When she left, it was a pretty devastating blow. But her moving didn’t stop us from creating together.”

Throughout 2011 and 2012, while Livingston-Shelburne was in Texas, the two traded song revisions using Dropbox. Livingston-Shelburne’s style tended toward the ambient and the electronic; Riede’s was more traditional. The songwriting ran slow.

“When we started writing the songs together, I had gotten out of a year-and-a-half-long relationship, and I was still reeling from that,” Riede says. “My brother had moved back to Seattle, and we had always been each other’s life lines. And then, within a couple months, my parents moved. I felt kind of lost. There was just that general feeling of, like, ‘Oh, what am I doing?’ And missing a place to call home.”

Livingston-Shelburne was feeling her own homesickness pangs. Lubbock, she says, was turning out to be a bit more Texas than she imagined. Though she felt the move had been necessary, the nostalgia of her band days had a strong pull.

“When we were sending things back and forth, we were talking about Cherry Tree Parade and I mentioned to him how much I missed it and how much I missed playing music,” Livingston-Shelburne says. “And I just kind of pitched it to him as a ‘days of yore’ reminiscent thing.”

Riede agrees: “I think a lot of the feelings in the songs that just kind of got conveyed were just that general feeling of being left behind or missing the people in your life. That’s the place that I wrote a lot of the stuff from.”

By the end of 2013, the duo had a batch of songs ready, and Livingston-Shelburne had moved back to the area. It was just a matter of finding the right people to replace the Dropbox compositions’ computer-generated instruments with live players. Talley and Snyder came from Gentlemen Savage; the final piece, Leonard, joined last August.

“It was one of those things where you have all these different pieces that you’re trying so hard to fit together,” Talley says. “But once we were all together and getting comfortable with the songs, it was kind of like a completed puzzle.”

Upstairs in Livingston-Shelburne’s dining room, the five band members sit together tightly. Our conversation has been dotted with glances and smiles passed among one another, the subtle language of friends who know each other well.

Yore has not yet played a live show for the public — Friday night at RecordBar is its Kansas City debut — but the band doesn’t seem anxious. None of its members is new to the stage — all, save for 23-year-old Leonard, are in the mid- to late 20s — and there have been plenty of these basement rehearsals.

“Jonny always says we should not be nervous if we know what we’re playing,” Leonard says, smiling. “So we practice quite a bit. And if Jon’s right, we won’t be nervous on Friday. Jon is wise.”