Country starts Love and Theft bring acoustic show to 4 Corners Bar on Thursday

In a modern country music world heavily dependent on autotune, overproduced studio recordings and hot dudes singing about drinking at the beach and chasing hot chicks with cosmopolitan sensibilities, yet downhome roots, the duo of Stephen Barker Liles and Eric Gunderson — better known as Love & Theft — fit in perfectly.

Yet behind all that glam country polish, Love & Theft can hold their own when it comes to raw, old school musicianship, which they’ll put on display in an acoustic mini-tour of Alaska this week that includes a stop in Palmer at the Four Corners Bar on Thursday night and continues the following night at the Last Frontier Bar in Anchorage.

“(Alaska music fans) appreciate live music coming up. We’re going acoustic and that’s kind of a lost art of being able to sing live and harmonize,” Liles said. “People are so used to autotune these days, it’s nice to see people appreciate two guys with two-fisted guitars.”

Not that Liles has a problem with the pop country sound and accompanying marketing that’s made them world famous with their eponymous 2012 release that climbed to No. 4 on the country charts, and featured hits like ‘Angel Eyes’, ‘If You Ever Get Lonely’ and ‘Runnin’ Out of Air’, but his band has steadily moved away from that sound, as evidenced in their 2015 effort ‘Whiskey on My Breath’.

The title tune of that album is two-part harmony that crescendos into the punchline delivered by an alcoholic whose life has gone to tatters, who isn’t afraid of death, but whose greatest fear is ‘Meeting Jesus with whiskey on my breath.’

“It’s hard to say what’s ‘real country,’” Liles said. “I think there’s four or five types of country now. There’s traditional, there’s pop country, country rock, there’s a more acoustic form… I think country now is where rock was in the 90s. Country really transformed into one of the last places you still hear real instruments. I love pop, but most of that stuff now is all programmed… country is currently the new rock and roll as far as marketability.”

The biggest influence from the 70s.

“We love The Eagles — that’s our favorite band. That’s where we come from, the world we live in,” Liles said. “But if The Eagles came out today, they’d be considered country.”

It was a common appreciation of The Eagles that brought the Nashville-based duo together to start with.

“Eric and I both grew up singing harmony in church, and my parents introduced me to The Eagles at an early age, so that’s how we first started hanging out,” Liles said. “It was the fact that they had back-and-forth harmonies — there was no one lead singer. That was really big for us; we’re a true duo. We’ve been very adamant from the beginning that we’re both lead singers.”

Love and Theft are no strangers to Alaska, having been up a few times and playing the Alaska State Fair in 2013. The Northern Lights Concert Series Tour also takes them to Juneau, and allows them a little time for tourist stuff.

“We’ve never been snowmachining, so we hope to do that and maybe even some fishing,” Liles said. “We went dog sledding last time with the guy who won the Iditarod. That was really cool; we’d love to do that again.”