The Fruition Trio — Kellen Asebroek, left, Mimi Naja and Jay Cobb Anderson — play Friday, Dec. 9, at the OK Theatre in Enterprise.

ENTERPRISE — Showcasing their well-loved songs in a new-fangled package, the Fruition Trio makes a tour stop at the OK Theatre Dec. 9.

The songwriting and harmonizing front members of Fruition are doing an experiment, band member Kellen Asebroek said, by performing without bassist Jeff Leonard and drummer Tyler Thompson, who became first-time fathers this year.

“While Jeff and Tyler take all the space they need to dedicate themselves to their families, we have a chance to do a trio version of the band,” Asebroek said.

Songwriting and the band’s signature three-part harmony stack has always fallen to Asebroek, Jay Cobb Anderson and Mimi Naja — the members on this fall’s tour.

“On paper, it is back to the rudimentary ingredients of the band, but really it is just as much a challenge and evolution,” Asebroke said. “It makes the music more vulnerable and exposed — you can hear little nuances when singing lead or harmony, or hear guitar chords as they are written, without layers of bass and electric guitar solos. It is a rawer form — a totally different approach — so it’s fun stepping outside the comfort zone.”

Relative newcomers to Portland, Asebroek, Anderson and Naja met through the music scene. Before long the three were busking on street corners and playing gigs with then-stand up bassist Keith Simon at music hotspots such as Laurelthirst Pub, Mississippi Pizza, Pub at End of Universe, Chaos Café, The Goodfoot and Fire on the Mountain.

Busking was part of the band’s early business model starting out in East Portland and later when they began touring.

“It was our all-in-one grassroots marketing, booking and rehearsal time — we were always simultaneously performing and learning which songs got people’s attention the most,” Asebroek said.

What worked best on the street, Asebroek said, were fast, rocking bluegrass songs with lots of harmony. There they made friends and fans and got connected to places to stay, as well as booking gigs in cafes and bars.

“We made so many of our inroads that way — in Santa Cruz, Eugene, Bend, Seattle — anywhere with a commercial, downtown square with lots of foot traffic we would play until the cops came, a store owner yelled at us, we got a gig, or made enough to go to dinner,” Asebroek said.

Since their beginnings in 2008, Fruition’s style has changed from acoustic and mountain grass-based songs to electrified rock and roll and until recently, the three songwriters worked on their songs separately — but that, too, is changing.

“We are family now and can let our guards down to make the songs better,” Asebroek said.

Once housemates, the band members live in different cities scattered across the country. Asebroek said he, Anderson and Naja now schedule one to three-day songwriting sessions where they work on song choruses, chord progressions, melodies and lyrics.

“Working on our next records has been a much more collaborative process and the next thing for us to unlock as far as the evolution of this band,” Asebroek said.

Songwriting dried up along with the live music bookings due to the COVID-19 restrictions that shut down venues and crippled the music industry. When their tour introducing the new album “Broken at the Break of Day” was canceled, the band members went to their respective homes to weather the storm.

“My lyrical creativity was sapped — it was hard to think of something to say that mattered,” Asebroek said. “What could I say about poverty, systemic racism, a dying planet?”

To get through more than a year of sitting on the bench, Asebroek said he and his bandmates took to social media and each Thursday afternoon they took turns streaming an hour of music and chatter with their fans.

“We had already been doing a monthly band conference call, so to stay sane, we decided early on to change it to weekly during the lockdown,” Asebroek said. “We made plans about what to do when things opened back up to keep our names in people’s minds and ears and hearts and then we started doing a weekly stream.”

He said the weekly streaming sessions were therapeutic as well as a way to stay connected with fans. Eventually, Asebroek said, he started writing again.

“It sucked for everybody and was pretty brutal on momentum for so many bands, but music, the universal language, gets us through tough times,” Asebroek said.

Tickets are $25 and available at www.eventbrite.com.