moe.

A Halloween favour in Buffalo

moe. started as a one-off. In October 1989 Chuck Garvey, Rob Derhak and drummer Ray Schwartz put something together at a friend's request to play a Halloween show at the University at Buffalo. The band took proper shape over the winter of 1990 under the name Five Guys Named Moe, borrowed from the Louis Jordan song, shortened to moe. by the autumn of that year, with the full stop added in 1991.

Al Schnier arrived by the side door, depping for Dave Kessler in early 1991 and joining outright in January 1992. Vinnie Amico took over the drum stool in 1996. Jim Loughlin handles percussion and mallets, and keyboard player Nate Wilson became the sixth member in 2023. The two-guitar front line of Garvey and Schnier, with Derhak's bass as the third melodic voice, has been the band's basic shape for more than three decades.

They came up through the circuit rather than through radio. moe. played the Furthur Festival in 1997, Woodstock '99, Bonnaroo and Lollapalooza, and opened shows for the Allman Brothers Band and the Who. Schnier has since been blunt about the major-label chapter, saying their time with Sony never made the band a priority, and that the lesson he passes on to younger players is simply to play constantly and be easy to work with so the invitations keep coming.

Fourteen studio albums and a label of their own

The debut, Fatboy, landed in 1992 and fixed moe.'s place in the improvisational rock scene of that decade. Fourteen studio albums have followed, along with a large catalogue of live releases, most of them on the band's own Fatboy Records rather than through a major.

The studio records that fans tend to argue over — Wormwood and The Conch among them — share a trait that sets moe. slightly apart from their peers: the songs are written as songs, with verses and hooks that survive on record, and the improvisation is built on top rather than substituted for structure. Tracks like "Rebubula", "Plane Crash", "Meat", "Buster" and "Tubing the River Styx" have been in rotation for decades and still get stretched past the ten-minute mark on any given night.

The last album before the current one was This Is Not, We Are in 2020, which left a five-year gap that the band spent dealing with rather more serious matters.

Two illnesses, two returns

In 2017 Derhak was diagnosed with cancer and moe. went on indefinite hiatus. He was declared cancer-free in December that year and the band resumed touring in February 2018.

On 6 November 2021, Garvey had a stroke. It took away his speech and left nerve damage in his right hand. He has described coming round able to recognise his wife and friends and understand what they were saying, but unable to answer them, and then relearning to speak from scratch with daily practice and sessions with a therapist once or twice a week. Relearning the guitar ran alongside it.

He came back on stage on New Year's Eve 2022 at the Fillmore in Philadelphia, just over a year after the stroke, and returned to full-time touring the following month. The band has not treated this as a closed chapter — Garvey has talked publicly about the nerves before, during and after shows — but he has now been back in the line-up for the best part of four years.

The experience has coloured how the band operates. The 2026 tour carried a pound of every ticket, one dollar, to the mental-health and suicide-prevention charity Eddie's Hugs, alongside work with the American Cancer Society's Rock The Pink campaign.

Circle of Giants, and a thirty-fifth year

Circle of Giants arrived on 31 January 2025 through Fat Boy Records and ATO, the fourteenth studio album and the first in five years. Ten tracks, with the writing spread around: Derhak contributed four, Schnier three and Wilson three, the latter including "Yellow Tigers" and "Giants" from a man who had only joined two years earlier.

Most of the material had already been road-tested. "Living Again" was first staged back in 2001; the lead single "Ups and Downs", which Derhak wrote during the pandemic for a solo project, had its live debut on 14 July 2023. Only "Beautiful Mess" went to tape without having been played in public. Reviewing it for Americana Highways, David Nowels called it one of the band's best and a record of a group still relevant, noting the studio finish of The Conch and Wormwood and the extended middle and outro jams left inside the songs. Schnier has singled out "Ups and Downs" as possibly the best thing Derhak has written, and "Band in the Sky" as his own favourite on the album for how plainly it came out.

The record anchored a 35th-anniversary tour that opened in Portland, Oregon on 30 January 2025 and closed in Charleston, South Carolina on 10 March.

The 2026 calendar: Born To Fly, moe.mentUM, moe.down

The Born To Fly Tour was announced in November 2025 — artist presale on 5 November, general sale on the 7th — and ran from 5 February to 23 May 2026 across roughly 35 to 40 dates. It opened with three nights at Higher Ground in South Burlington, Vermont, took in three at the Town Ballroom in Buffalo in mid-February, four at Ardmore Music Hall in Pennsylvania from 4 to 7 March, two at the Orange Peel in Asheville on 20 and 21 March, and two at the Ogden in Denver in late April, before finishing at the Rooster Walk festival in Axton, Virginia. Multi-night stands were the structural point: markets in the Southeast and Texas that had been thin for years got a proper visit.

Summer brought moe.mentUM, a 17-show co-headline with Umphrey's McGee announced on 4 March and running from XL Live in Harrisburg on 11 June to Ravinia in Highland Park, Illinois on 15 August. The format was two full sets, one band each, then a shared encore — delivered every night except 11 July at Sand Mountain Amphitheater in Albertville, Alabama, where weather intervened. The opening night saw moe. play nine songs starting with "Crab Eyes"; the Ravinia finale had the full moe. line-up open the encore with "Rebubula" joined by Brendan Bayliss, Joel Cummins and Andy Farag, then hand over to Umphrey's for a Paul Simon cover. Two days later the band turned up unbilled at Garcia's in Chicago as Monkeys On Ecstasy.

Between the two came the return of moe.down. Announced on 9 December 2025 and held from 16 to 18 July 2026 at the West End Fairgrounds in Gilbert, Pennsylvania, it was the first since moe.down 17 in July 2019 and the first away from the band's old upstate New York sites. Attendance was capped at 3,500. The band played a 13-song set on the Thursday including Led Zeppelin's "No Quarter", two sets on the Friday that worked in Genesis material before an all-originals second frame and a "Rebubula" encore, and a closing Saturday with Mike Dillon on vibraphone and Daniel Donato on "Mexico", ending on an extended "Plane Crash" into "Wind It Up". A new song, "Carnival Freaks", got an airing. A barn on site was given over to the Moe.seum, a retrospective of 35 years of band and festival history, and a dog called Miko was elected Mayor of moe.down.

Where they stand now

Coming out of the summer, moe. went back to theatre-sized rooms. A West Coast swing in mid-October took in Lake Tahoe, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Solana Beach. Portland, Maine follows on 29 October, then two nights at the Wilbur in Boston on 30 and 31 October for Halloween — a date the band has historically used for costumes and one-off covers. December brings two nights at the Bearsville Theater in Woodstock on the 11th and 12th, Infinity Music Hall in Norfolk, Connecticut on the 14th, and a run at Garcia's in Chicago before the year ends.

No new album has been announced. Schnier has said there is more material than the band can use, with both Loughlin and Derhak having written enough for records of their own during the gap years, and several new pieces were being worked up during 2026. On present evidence the next release will arrive when the songs have been played in enough to earn it, which is how the last one was made.