The archetypical American band works harder to get signed to a record label than they usually get credit for. Ideally, the invested work pays off big with worldwide fame and die hard fans.

Unfortunately, this almost always ends badly as the stress accompanying fame weighs down upon bands until they break.

Once a tour bus begins to fill with stress balls and its inhabitants develop stomach ulcers, the end is near. But what happens after the break up truly defines each member of the band.

When A.A. Bondy’s former band, Verbena, broke up, he decided to take a lifelong break from making music professionally. This did not work well as his internal muse would not let the songwriter inside him rest.

“I didn’t ever stop playing, but I also didn’t think I would ever make records again,” he said. “Eventually I found myself still wanting to write songs and then compile them into albums.”

These songs inevitably made their way onto Bondy’s first solo release, “American Hearts,” which recast him as an acoustic songwriter, shocking fans of Verbena’s grunge music. Released four years after Verbena’s 2003 break-up, the album boldly declared Bondy’s return, made possible by the inspiration drawn during the rest and relaxation period spent away from the music industry.

Now, two years after “American Hearts,” Bondy’s 2009 sophomore album “When the Devil’s Loose” has begun to draw interest from fans and critics alike. Bondy has proven once again to be an amorphous musician, reverting to a full band sound.

“You know, I just didn’t want to be the guy with the acoustic guitar and the harmonica anymore, so I changed my sound again,” Bondy said. “For most bands, things don’t change that much from record to record, but for me, those changes can be drastic. I just get bored.”

Bondy can rest assured that he won’t be bored in the coming months as he tours constantly until January, traveling back and forth between the States and Europe, stopping only in February to begin work on his next album. He claims that “Once you’ve worked out here, you kind of find it hard to get used to doing nothing,” indicating that he is just getting started again and plans to devote himself purely to his music career.

With every new album, Bondy evolves as a musician, but there are similarities amongst all of his lyrics. From early Verbena to his newest work, Bondy tries to capture exactly what he is feeling at emotionally dense moments in his life.

“A lot of what I write has to do with what I’m feeling, and what I’ve learned through darker experiences, where the event in and of itself doesn’t even matter, but the way you feel afterwards means everything.” Bondy said. “The live show should be bigger and more in color, I think. It gets louder than the record, and it gets quieter than the record.”