To capture some sense of spontaneity and cohesion, the five guys of 3 Doors Down decided to live and breathe music under the same roof.

Last year, the multiplatinum pop-rock band wrote and recorded round-the-clock in two houses - one in Nashville, Tenn., during the winter, the other in Orlando, Fla., during the summer. When the album was finished, it made sense to name it after the group.

"We really sat and tried to make it a part of us," says lead guitarist Chris Henderson. He and his bandmates - lead vocalist Brad Arnold, guitarist Matt Roberts, bassist Todd Harrell and drummer Greg Upchurch - headline Merriweather Post Pavilion in Columbia on Saturday night. "It was a real band effort. Everybody contributed to everything this time."

But still, the band needed somebody at the helm of 3 Doors Down, so the guys hired producer Johnny K, who had worked on Seventeen Days, the band's 2005 platinum seller that preceded the new CD.

"We really wanted to give Johnny a good shot at producing us this time," says Henderson, who last week was on the band's tour bus en route to Nashville. "With this album, we changed a lot of things. We experimented with some things."

That sense of musical experimentation is rather subtle on the new album, 3DD's fourth release for Universal Records.

The post-grunge elements of the group's previous efforts (i.e. the heavy layers of guitar) have given way to a more compressed, conventional and smooth approach. Prominent shades of classic Southern rock, sprinkled with a bit of '80s metal, now color the sound. But the lyrical earnestness that has defined the Mississippi band remains. "Citizen/Soldier," for instance, was written as a tribute to the National Guard. A year before the new album hit the streets in May, the song was used in a recruitment ad for the Guard.

"The National Guard asked us to write the song," Henderson says. "It was natural for us to match the song with what they needed. They wanted a song about the Guard being a community service, being a community support system. They wanted to raise awareness to that effect."

Elsewhere on the album, 3DD centers on moody soul-searching. Some of it, like the yearning single "It's Not My Time," is bolstered by strong, emotive vocals by Arnold. But the music throughout is rather indistinct. Guitars surge but don't really go anywhere. The youthful angst that fueled such early hits as "Kryptonite" isn't as pervasive anymore.

Still, in some ways, Henderson says, the band wants to incorporate more of the music that influenced the band before its rise to pop stardom nearly a decade ago.

"If you really listen to our music, you hear a lot of what we heard in Mississippi: gospel, country, the blues. You heard it by default growing up there," he says. "We couldn't help but put it in our music."

Since its commercial breakthrough in 2000, 3 Doors Down has sold more than 18 million albums and notched six No. 1 singles. After its release, the new album debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard charts and has since gone gold.

Despite those successes, Henderson says, the band is always looking for ways to energize its music. And writing and recording in the same house for several months was rejuvenating.

"We had lived together before," Henderson says. "But we never wrote and recorded like that before. Everything on the record we were able to do as we thought it."

Yet the band was still mindful of appeasing fans.

"You got to earn success, you know," Henderson says. "The public is very fickle. We do what we do with our fingers crossed."

IF YOU GO

See 3 Doors Down at Merriweather Post Pavilion, 10475 Little Patuxent Parkway in Columbia, at 6:30 p.m. Saturday. Tickets are $29.50-$75 and are available through Ticketmaster by calling 410-547-7328 or going to ticketmaster.com.