If you were at Saturday night of this year’s Ann Arbor Folk Festival, you probably remember Americana band The Steel Wheels, the quartet of guys gathered cozily around a single microphone who sounded just as great harmonizing a cappella as they did performing with instruments.

And although the Folk Festival limited opening groups to short sets, that won’t be the case Saturday night when The Steel Wheels return to town to play a full show at The Ark.

“Initially, when you first hear you are playing the festival, then you hear (you get) a 20-minute set, that’s weird,” acknowledged vocalist Trent Wagler. “But once you get there and you realize the scene … how 3,000 people or so hang out in a beautiful auditorium with an amazing lineup just one after another. It’s a great audience and people really take pride in their festival.”

Besides Wagler, the group, which hails from the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, includes Jay Lapp (vocals, mandolin), Brian Dickel (bass) and Eric Brubaker (fiddle). The band has been together since 2005, but began to play and tour seriously in 2010.

“It’s been a slow burn where we’ve really been able to hone in on what each person in the band is good at and take that and try to embellish that for the sound we’re trying to get without a lot of pressure from the outside,” Wagler said. “In 2010, we had already been playing together for five years. To the outside world, or at least a lot of it, we were brand new. We do feel like brothers in a lot of ways.

“It’s a good group of guys and we have a lot of fun together (and) that really helps us when it’s time to write new songs and put music together. We’re playful when we’re not playing music, so when we get the instruments out it’s just an extension of what we’re doing,” he added.

Wagler said the single-microphone approach leads to a more natural sound and also helps set The Steel Wheels apart from other roots bands.

“We’d seen other bands work with it—we tried it and we liked it,” Wagler explained. “We’ve done it for a long time and I forget how it strikes or surprises an audience as being unique. … A lot of it is growing to appreciate hearing the natural sounds of each other’s instruments as well as voices, and trying to naturally blend on stage as much as possible instead of relying on perfect monitor sound.”

The band is also known for its annual SpokeSongs bicycle music tour, during which band members tow their instruments, equipment, and merchandise from one gig to another via bicycle and blog about their adventures. They’ve been in the Wolverine state twice with the tour, but not this year.

“We did do Michigan tour two years in a row … we’re planning at this point to go down to North Carolina. The plans are still in the making. I’m sure we’ll bring it back to Michigan at some point,” Wagler said.

The band does have a new CD coming out right at the time of The Ark show, hard on the heels of last year’s “Lay Down, Lay Low.” This one is titled “No More Rain.”

“We’re trying to be as prolific as possible,” said Wegler.

“‘No More Rain’ is kind of a collection of the earliest songs that we came together and wrote and played together from ’05 through ’08. We decided to pick a few of those favorites. … It was fun to get together and put something new into these songs that were primarily older songs for us and give them a little resurrection.”

They also included, as the album’s first track, Tom Waits’ “Walk Away,” which Wagler said gets to the essence of the project.

“It was a nice tie-in because the lyrics of that song have the refrain ‘I want to walk away and start over again.’ It’s bit of a tip of the hat to the rest of the album, of going back and starting over again but also moving forward.”

“We’re delivering this album this year while actually writing a lot of brand new stuff that hasn’t been recorded yet, so the three year plan is ‘Lay Down, Lay Low’ in 2012, ‘No More Rain’ in 2013, and then we’re hoping to have all new songs for 2014.”