It’s a glorious mid-April day, and the birds are playing a symphony outside the fifth-story windows of Hi-n-Dry, a recording studio atop a solid old industrial building just outside Cambridge’s Inman Square. Laurie Sargent, Billy Conway, and Dana Colley are sitting around a table. Actually, Sargent is tilted back in a chair with her feet up. Colley is arching on his seat in an insouciant slouch. And Conway is perched on a giant yellow rubber exercise ball, slightly bouncing up and down as we speak. The conversation turns to why they’ve given their new band, the Twinemen, such an unusual name.

"Mark Sandman had this cartoon strip called The Twinemen, about a ball of twine with three heads, which was his comic reflection of us in the band," Conway explains. "The band," of course, is Morphine, the sonorous, deep-sounding trio that Sandmen fronted until he suffered a fatal heart attack on an Italian stage in 1999. "It starts with two heads. Then a third figure comes in to play drums and gets entwined. They go into the studio and make a hit record, and they get neurotic and go to a therapist who snips them apart. But that doesn’t work out . . . "

" . . . And they go to jail," Colley chimes in. "It’s great. It has the trajectory of a VH-1 Behind the Music."

"It so succinctly explains what it’s like being in any band," Sargent says a fraction of a breath after Colley finishes his last syllable. "You’re twined together, and when you’re apart you’re less than you are together, but when you’re together, you want to kill each other.

"We picked the name the day we finished the record. We went out to celebrate, and I watched Dana and Billy sit down and pour their coffee at the same time, put the same stuff in it, stir it at the same time. And as both of their spoons were clicking it was like, ‘I’m with the fucking Twinemen!’ "

What Sargent didn’t notice is that she’d become a Twineman as well. It’s obvious from the way these three connect one another’s sentences and thoughts, and from the utterly relaxed way they hang out together. It helps, of course, that Sargent and Conway are married, and that Conway and Colley played together in Morphine for nearly eight years. But they also have that indefinable thing called "chemistry," as friends and as musicians.

At least that’s what it seems like this afternoon, and when they’re on stage. So far the Twinemen have done just four shows with an expanded performing line-up at Cambridge’s intimate Lizard Lounge, where the music has spilled out in warm, rolling grooves over a crowd of ardently respectful listeners. Among them have been a swarm of Morphine fans, music journalists, radio programmers, and Boston rock cognoscenti including Peter Wolf. Sargent applies her warm-toned voice to songs about midgets and figurative giants, to stories of life and its joys and losses. Conway keeps his drums pattering, his carefully tuned kit — struck with care and restraint — adding to the warmth of the music. Colley’s sax-stretched melodies blow sonic smoke rings in the air, teaming with the notes from Andrew Mazzone’s bass and the adjunct horns of Russ Gershon and Evan Harriman to create chords that dissipate into the aural equivalent of a black-and-white movie fog. And Stu Kimball’s guitar injects sugarbursts and thunderbolts — patches of color that nudge new directions into the mix. The overall effect on that stage and in the Twinemen’s just-finished debut album is a combination of gentility and intricacy and depth. Their sound is comforting, but it offers plenty. It’s fueled by virtuosity and rich with improvisation and yet always smooth, cool, textured, and relaxed, even when Sargent is working the lyrics into a fever.

"The beacon for creating these songs was to make music that couldn’t be easily categorized," Conway points out. "I like the open-endedness of this group. We left the door open for any direction we wanted to take." For Colley, that includes turns at bass, guitar, banjo, and other instruments. For Conway, that means replacing the drummer’s usual urge to be rhythmic with the idea of being simply musical — a tack that’s already a hallmark of his formidable style. As for Sargent, a versatile and natural singer who’s a veteran of the ’80s Boston band Face to Face and several major-label solo releases, with the Twinemen she enjoys the freedom to improvise melodies and phrases and even new words. "It’s probably the most unstructured music I’ve ever played," she says. And yet it seems as solid as the brick walls that enclose Hi-n-Dry.

The Twinemen began to take shape two years ago, just before Colley, Conway, and Sargent put together Orchestra Morphine, their touring musical tribute to Sandman. "The three of us spent a little time playing around and writing some music," Sargent says. "It got shelved when we did Orchestra Morphine, but a lot of that material got pulled out when my own band did a residency at the Lizard Lounge. I made a rule for those shows that we’d play three new songs a night, so we’d learn them during soundcheck. They had a different feel from the songs my band was already doing, and we started putting them on tape."

Conway says to Sargent, "We were making your record [a more structured solo album called Cockypop, which will follow the summer release of the Twinemen’s debut CD] at the same time, and it became clear some of the songs didn’t fit. We just kept recording with nothing in mind other than to make great songs together. And the next thing we knew we had close to an album, so then we figured we might as well write and record a few more. And then we realized we’ve got a band and we’re looking for a name to call it." The rest, of course, is comic-strip history.

The Family Jewels’ roots, like the Twinemen’s, run deep. The spark for this new, jumping, R&B-saturated congregation of local rock-scene veterans — built around the kind of six-part harmonies rarely heard since the days when Frankie Lymon asked why fools fall in love — ignited 12 years ago. Another thing the band share with the Twinemen is bass player Andrew Mazzone, who leads the Jewels with guitarist Asa Brebner, a respected songwriter and solo artist who’s played with Jonathan Richman, Robin Lane and the Chartbusters, and many others. (For the record: Mazzone also recently played in a short-lived resurrection of Treat Her Right, a band originally fronted by Mark Sandman and David Champagne before Sandman founded Morphine.)

In 1990, the two musicians assembled a group to play a friend’s wedding, but instead of the usual fare they polished up the nuggets of classic R&B, tunes like Etta James’s "I’d Rather Go Blind" and Louis Jordan’s "Caledonia." They enlisted lead vocalist Fred Griffith, who’s got a way with the swoops and growls of that music. And they killed, getting so many offers, they could have kept on playing well-paid party gigs for the next dozen years. That is exactly what Griffith did and continues to do as the leader of Blue Heaven, which evolved from that one-shot band.

"That’s why the Family Jewels can’t play weekends," Brebner laments. "Freddie’s got these well-paying wedding gigs every Saturday."

Although Brebner and Mazzone stepped off the rice-and-cake circuit to pursue their own creative avenues, they’ve always wanted to get back to the heart of the music they played with Griffith. Hence the Family Jewels, an outfit that finds these three joined by MVP drummer Billy Beard, guitarist David Champagne (currently of Lucky Bastard and the Heygoods), occasionally Dana Colley, lap-steel ace Steve Sadler, saxist Paul Ahlstrand, and whoever else gets dragged into the ensemble for their thoroughly entertaining gigs. They play most Thursdays at 7 p.m. at Porter Square’s Toad, where they spill across the tiny stage and into the buzzing crowd.

With the Family Jewels, Brebner and Mazzone have delved even deeper for the lost gems and one-hit-wonders of R&B, tunes like the ’50s regional hit "Ka-Ding Dong" by Roxbury’s own still-going G-Clefs, and the great Louis Jordan double-entendre swinger "That Chick’s Too Young To Fry." Both appear on the Jewels’ self-released debut CD, Saturday Night — which was also recorded at Hi-n-Dry. The title may be a dig at Griffith’s wedding-band activities, but it’s certainly a nod to the spirit of this music, which fueled weekend dances and dates in the days before rock took hold and was still part of a secret code for teenagers that translated across divisions of race, class, and spirit.

"This stuff is the original underground music," says Mazzone. "Some of these songs were from bands that only lasted two years or never got out of their area."

"This stuff was considered race records," Brebner adds, "before Elvis legitimized black music for a white audience, so a lot of this people haven’t heard unless they listen to bluesophile shows." Of course, Brebner and Mazzone are connoisseurs of this music, with record collections that embrace everything from the gospel stylings of the Prisonaires to hillbilly star Johnny Horton.

Despite the relaxed rhythmic expertise of Beard and Mazzone and Brebner’s encyclopædic grasp of pre-’60s rock and blues guitar licks, the Family Jewels are, as Mazzone stresses, "a vocal band, not a blues band." That’s not only because almost everybody in the band sings, it’s because of how they sing. The group’s architecture is erected on a foundation of doo-wop. "The rhythmic parts are really done by the back-up singers, and the instrumentation supports that," Brebner explains. "It’s the ooos and yadda-yaddas that really make the rhythmic thing happen. And when people ask me, ‘How come your band makes me feel so happy?’, I think it’s because all of these people are singing at once. The beauty of this music is that we’re doing it because we love it." Mazzone adds, "We’re well past the stage where we care about trendy. And the well we can draw upon for material is so vast."

"Andrew and I have both played in major-label bands and gone for the brass ring through the years," Brebner offers. "But this band is all for the sake of the music, and we feel like we can play this music with credibility when we’re 80 years old, if we live that long."