Thirty years after a garage in San Diego, Switchfoot closed out Choctaw Avenue on Saturday night. They are still chasing the thing they have never been able to name.

The stage on Choctaw Avenue belonged Saturday night to a band that started in a garage.

Switchfoot headlined the Dancing Rabbit Music Festival, the free outdoor show that has brought music to downtown McAlester since 2021. Brother Rabbit played McAlester for the first time. EG Vines, back at the festival again, was on the bill too. Then five men from San Diego, thirty years into this, plugged in.

Jon Foreman sings and plays guitar. His brother Tim plays bass. Chad Butler has been behind the drums since 1996, when the three of them started the band. Jerome Fontamillas joined in 2001. Boaz Roberts toured with them five years before becoming a full member this year.

They won a Grammy in 2011 for Hello Hurricane. The Beautiful Letdown sold more than three million copies. And they still talk about the garage.

Before it was any of this, it was a few friends from high school in San Diego, some instruments, and no real plan. Music had been in the house long before that, Motown records playing all the time, a musician for a father. But playing every day, with other people, turned out to be a different thing.

“I think discovering the communal aspect of playing music with other people was what really hooked me,” one of them says.

That was the hook. It has held for thirty years.

They say they feel privileged to have made this more than a hobby. Not many people get to do it this long, with the same people.

Ask what they were chasing at the start and you will not get a clean answer.

“I don’t know that we do have the words for it,” one of them says. He thinks that is part of the deal. You set out after something without knowing exactly what it is, and the thing keeps moving on you.

Another one puts a finer point on it. Chasing implies an ending. “I think the chase is what you’re chasing.”

One thing they can describe is those first shows, in somebody’s garage or somebody’s backyard. What struck them was who showed up. Every kind of person, none of them alike, all singing the same words at the same time.

Sweating together, as one of them puts it.

That picture never left. One of them describes it as the moment when many voices sing one song, and he is careful to say it runs both directions. It is not only the crowd singing along with the band. “It’s us singing with them as well.”

Thirty years is a long time to hold anything together. Asked what the hard part is, the part nobody in the crowd sees, the answer comes back fast.

“Bass players.”

The honest answer arrives a minute later. There are seasons, one of them says, usually at the end of one record and before the next, when they stop and ask each other a serious question. They never want to be on a hamster wheel, doing the thing only because it is the thing they have always done. If you are going to make art, it ought to give something back to you.

So before every album they ask it out loud. Is this something we are willing to pour all of ourselves into? Are we still committed to each other?

For their new record, saying yes cost them something.

Forever Now came out June 26. It is their fourteenth album, thirteen songs, and they made it with producer Mike Elizondo at his Phantom Studios outside Nashville. Elizondo is not a stranger to them. He produced their album Vice Verses back in 2011.

Still, the math was strange. They own a studio in San Diego that costs them nothing, and their families are right there. They spent their own money and time to go to Tennessee instead.

“Why would you leave your studio, with your family right there, with all the things you need, to go make a record somewhere else?”

Because Elizondo has been a true friend and a musical collaborator for years, they say, and a good sounding board. Whether it was truly a risk, they will never know. There is no other version to hold this one against. “There’s no other iteration of life, so we’ll never know.”

The sound came back around on its own. For a while, one of them says, the electric guitar had simply gotten boring. Inspiration was arriving from everywhere else. Then he picked the guitar up again and remembered how amazing those pedals are.

“I literally just fell in love with riffs again.”

It was not only him. The whole band got excited about it. Riff rock, they call it.

They do not see the record as a return to some older self. To them it was always them. “It’s just different colors coming through the prism.”

Putting it into the world was still frightening. It always is. But you reach a point, they say, where the whole band loves the thing and is ready to stand behind it. After that it stops being only theirs, which they seem to like. A song written alone at two in the morning ends up meaning something exact to a stranger across the world.

“It’s their song now. But it’s also still my song.”

Saturday ran close to a hundred degrees on Choctaw Avenue. Pepsi set up and handed out cold drinks for nothing. People came anyway, until it was one of the bigger crowds the festival has drawn in six seasons.

Jeremy Beaver, one of the festival’s organizers, said he had never seen a Dancing Rabbit audience take part like that. A beach ball went up over the crowd. People danced in the heat. They sang the words back.

Asked what they hope people feel when the music comes on, one of them does not need time to think.

“Welcome.”

Nobody on Choctaw Avenue paid to get in Saturday night. That is one way of saying the same thing.