Justin A. Rice ’99 and Christian T. Rudder ’97 of indie rock band Bishop Allen may one day thank Middle-English literature for making them rock stars. Bishop Allen, so-named for the street in Central Square where Rice and Rudder first lived and recorded together, would never have been were it not for the pesky concentration requirement that led to their first encounter.

“We were in English 10a together,” says Rudder of his first conversation with Rice. “He was in my section. I had seen him at a show, and he seemed kind of cool so I started talking to him. We immediately started talking about music and we pretty much formed a band right there, coming out of Sever Hall.”

The band Rudder and Rice formed, however, was not the one which would later lead them to indie glory and critical renown. Both were members of Record Hospital, the underground rock department of Harvard radio station WHRB, and their first band accordingly had a rougher edge.

“We were called the Pissed Officers,” Rudder explains. “We were sort of punk and we played around campus.”

It wasn’t until after graduation that Rice and Rudder began a recording project in their Central Square apartment and Bishop Allen was born. Over the next two years, they recorded and released their debut album Charm School, which Rolling Stone called “charmed harmonic bliss” in a four-star review in 2003.

EXTENDED PLAYERS

After that, their sophomore slump set in.

“We had been trying to record a full-length record and we were kind of lost and frustrated and it was not coming together,” says Rice of the two years following Charm School’s release.

“We weren’t really touring, we weren’t really putting out records, and you’re not really a band at that point.”

Fortunately, after a stagnant 2005, the pair stumbled upon inspiration in the form of an abandoned piano they discovered on the street.

“There was something about the piano that just wanted us to play it,” recalls Rice. “So we brought it to the practice space. I would play the piano and Christian was playing the drums with his feet and then he would play the guitar.”

“We ended up coming up with songs that were new and different from anything we’d made before,” he continues. “It ended up being a way to get out of the rut.”

“We recorded ‘January,’” says Rudder, referring to the EP that emerged from the piano’s recording sessions. “It was really refreshing to be writing and making music again.”

So refreshing, in fact, that it quickly spurred 12 tenacious months of recording.

“One of us suggested, ‘Hey, let’s do this next month,’” says Rudder, “and within a matter of like, ten minutes the idea had metastasized from ‘lets do a couple of songs’ to ‘let’s have a whole yearlong project.’”

The execution of the yearlong project would ultimately entail the recording of twelve self-released EP’s in 2006.

“It was a bigger risk than I think we realized,” says Rudder, recalling the work involved in such a mammoth task.

Rice agrees: “The hardest thing was definitely making the songs. But there were other things. We always had to come up with [album] artwork. We always had to deal with the pressing plant and constantly fulfilling orders. Every month I’d spend about 20 hours hand-addressing the envelopes and getting them to post office. But it was exciting, and the exciting aspects overwhelmed the annoying and the dull aspects.”

Rudder, too, admits that the EP project wasn’t easy.

“It was really a lot of work and it felt like it was never going to end for a long time,” he says. “I’m really glad that we were able to pull it off. There was always doubt in our minds but it worked out.”

DOIN’ IT WELL

In addition to inspiring a new musical turn, the EP project’s success secured the band’s fate, both in the minds of its members and in the media.

“Before we started on that project we had stalled,” says Rice. “Finishing was a big thing psychologically. You have to wake up every day and decide you want to be a band and if we’d failed it would have been hard to wake up at all.”

“It also helped a lot that there was something for people who were writing blogs to talk about,” he continues. “People knew that they could always find songs; if they came to our site every month there would be four new songs that they could listen to. The collector mentality really kicked in and once people caught on to the pattern it became like a compulsion for a lot of people to constantly keep up with. And that was great.”

Once the grunt work was over, offers from labels began to roll in. Bishop Allen recently signed to Dead Oceans, a sub-group of the Secretly Canadian record label, where they hope to preserve their “do-it-yourself” mode of operation.

“That’s the only way that makes sense to me,” says Rice. “The kind of music that we make isn’t about virtuosity. It’s about connection and part of being connected to the music is that it has to be ours it has to be something that we make because we want to and we make it the way that we want to make it.”

“We love doing things ourselves and there’s a lot of pride in doing that. We like making the decisions and being involved in all of the aspects of our band. So that’s the main thing for us. We’d gotten offers from people and we’d turned them all down until Dead Oceans,” says Rudder.

BACK FOR THE FIRST TIME

The band will be touring this summer in support of an upcoming release, “The Broken String,” their first on Dead Oceans. 12 tracks long, this latest album includes eight re-arranged, re-mastered tracks from the 2006 EPs.

“It’s pretty exciting,” says Rice. “It’s definitely the full realization of what we worked on last year.”

“At the moment it’s starting to happen,” he continues. “Things are looking up, and after this record comes out, I think that they’ll be even better. Now we don’t really have to worry about getting by and now that that’s happening we can really focus on becoming as good as we can possibly be. I think that for a long time now I imagine that we’ll be doing this. Writing songs and playing shows.”

This weekend, Bishop Allen returns to their old Cambridge stomping grounds for a show at the Middle East. They now pop where they used to punk, but lest listeners think that their evolution has only been a musical one, they note that beyond Chaucer as well as “Charm School.”

“When I was in college, I used to read a book and write a paper about it,” notes Rice. “Now, I read a book and write a song.”

—Staff writer Anna K. Barnet can be reached at abarnet@fas.harvard.edu.

—Staff writer Nayeli E. Rodriguez can be reached at Rodriguez@fas.harvard.edu.