Little Feat will tour in support of the album, “Strike Up The Band,” from May through October, including a May 19 stop at the Prairie Home Alliance Theater at the Peoria Civic Center. (Photo courtesy of Little Feat)

The last time veteran rock-funk-folk-jazz-country-swamp boogie band Little Feat played in the Peoria area, during the 2022 Summer Camp Music Festival, the group of seasoned musicians and road warriors offered a song-by-song recreation of their epic live album, “Waiting for Columbus,” the 1978 platinum-selling double disc that introduced FM radio listeners to seminal classics such as “Dixie Chicken,” “Willin’,” and “Time Loves A Hero.”

Fast-forwarding to 2025, “Feat,” as the group is known to its faithful legion of fans, most of whom now find themselves in graybeard status, has reemerged as anything but a nostalgia act. Buoyed by the success of their 2024 Grammy-nominated “Sam’s Place” release (a blues-based album spotlighting Feat member and linchpin conga member, Sam Clayton), Little Feat will release “Strike Up The Band,” an album of all-new material that builds on the band’s 56-year history and reestablishes their current lineup as a collaborative creative force in the music industry, in May. Sparked by the addition of guitarist, recording artist and band leader Scott Sharrard, Little Feat will tour in support of the album from May through October, including a May 19 stop at the Prairie Home Alliance Theater at the Peoria Civic Center.

“The first time I ever heard Little Feat was when they played ‘Let it Roll’ (the title track of the band’s 1988 initial comeback album following the death of founder Lowell George) on Saturday Night Live,” said Sharrard, 48, from his home in New York City. “I was too young to remember ‘Waiting for Columbus’ when it came out; I was a ‘Let it Roll’ kid.”

Born in Ann Arbor, Michigan and raised in Dearborn, Michigan, Sharrard plunged headlong into music at the Milwaukee High School of the Arts in Wisconsin. “I was 16 and playing in bars all the time. When I was about 20, I moved to New York, but I grew up playing in Illinois, particularly in Chicago, so Illinois is a part of my background,” he said.

After a long career as a guitarist, recording artist and bandleader, most recently for the late Gregg Allman, Sharrard joined Little Feat in October of 2019 when longtime band member Paul Barrere began to experience failing health. Liver disease would soon take the life of Barrere, a guitarist who joined the band in 1973 and remained an integral member through decades of various incarnations and periods of hiatus.

“My favorite bands in my youth were Little Feat and the Allman Brothers Band,” said Sharrard. “I’ve been obsessed with (late Little Feat co-founder) Lowell George as a singer-songwriter-guitarist since my earliest days. The Gregg Allman gig started when I sat in with the Allman Brothers Band in 2008 and Gregg, at the end of that performance, asked me to join his (solo) band.

“I was with Gregg the last decade of his career and we made two records together, we wrote a bunch of songs together, and he covered one of my songs a couple of times. We did the ‘Back to Macon’ (live) album and ‘Southern Blood,’ for which we got nominated for a Grammy. I was very lucky to be a part of that.”

Spring of 2015 found the Gregg Allman Band paired with the Doobie Brothers for a successful North American tour that was extended into August and September. As lifelong Little Feat “fanatics,” Sharrard and Allman were delighted to be introduced to original Feat member Bill Payne, who had just begun playing keyboards for the Doobies.

“We did a lot of jamming together on that tour, and fast forwarding to the fall of 2019, Paul Barrere had to miss a couple of gigs and they couldn’t find anyone to sub for him. Bill Payne was on tour with the Doobie Brothers at the time, who had hired (Allman’s) tour manager, our horn players and our percussionist, Marc Quinones, after Gregg passed away. Bill and I talked, and afterward I had about three weeks to learn the whole (Feat) catalogue,” Sharrard said. The curtain was literally ready to raise on Sharrard’s debut with Little Feat just after soundcheck on Oct. 27, 2019, in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, when the band received news that Barrere had succumbed to cancer. The band mourned the passing of their longtime bandmate and anchor, announced his passing to the audience, then performed the show in Barrere’s honor.

It was what Sharrard referred to as a “trial by fire” introduction to his membership in the Little Feat family.

Sharrard describes Feat’s sound as “taking the Beatles’ formula of this kind of open salon of total musical influence, with everything on the table from Cole Porter to Beethoven to Hank Williams to Muddy Waters and Little Richard, and mixing it up and telling your story with poetry. Little Feat was one of those bands in the late ’60s and early ’70s that took that Beatles formula and pushed it further. But you have to have the acuity and the discipline to master a variety of musical styles, and I think that’s what makes Little Feat unique in the pantheon of ’70s rock bands.”

Touring behind Feat’s new “Strike Up the Band” album will be original member and keyboardist Payne, Sharrard, Sam Clayton on percussion and Kenny Gradney on bass, both of whom joined in 1972 for Feat’s “Dixie Chicken” album, and guitarist Fred Tackett, who famously arranged Feat’s first-ever gig in 1969 (at entertainer Jimmy Webb’s birthday party) and officially joined Feat as a singer-songwriter around 1987. Rounding out the band are Roy Estrada and Tony Leone.

The new album, at 13 songs — very prolific for a Feat record — was produced by Payne and in-demand Nashville producer Vance Powell, with Sharrard co-producing seven tracks. The reinvigorated band was joined on select tracks by special musical guests including Larkin Poe and Molly Tuttle. “Strike Up the Band” is Little Feat’s first studio album release since 2012’s “Rooster Rag.”

“I was very concerned about preserving that classic Little Feat sound. The songs I wrote for this album I had originally written in 2019-2020 right after I started playing with the band. I wanted to honor the tradition and over 50-year legacy of what a Little Feat record should sound like, and when I brought the songs to the guys to consider for this album, they liked them. We think this sounds like a Little Feat record, but it’s up to the listeners to decide for themselves,” Sharrard said.
In addition to songs from “Strike Up the Band” (singles “Too High to Cut My Hair” and the title track, featuring Tuttle, were dropped in advance of the May 9 full-album release), Feat will also perform some songs from their Grammy-nominated “Sam’s Place” blues release for the Peoria audience.

“Sam Clayton will be singing a couple of songs from “Sam’s Place” when we come and play for you guys,” said Sharrard. “You’re going to also hear all of the hits and the new songs, so there will be a variety of material.”