Relient K played its first gig in December 1997, back when Matthew Thiessen and guitarist Matt Hoopes were still in high school and tooling around in the latter’s Plymouth Reliant K, which inspired the band’s name. The group recorded its first demo the following year with producer Mark Lee Townsend, who has worked on each of the band’s subsequent full-length albums (although Five Score And Seven Years Ago was largely produced by Howard Benson).