Moon Box wants listeners to sit back and feel the love.

Byline: Serena Markstrom The Register-Guard

CONCERT PREVIEW The Moon Box What: CD release party When: 9:30 p.m. Saturday Where: Luna, 30 E. Broadway Tickets: $8 advance, $10 day of show

The Moon Box started out as a project, not a band, when Daniel Teran-Gallo and his wife, Jami, wanted to make an album. But the Moon Box, the band, is ready for its CD release party at Luna, a place that couldn't be more appropriate for its work.

Half of the tracks on `33 Songs" mention the moon, and they all spend some time in the sky with lyrics heavy on star and planet imagery.

If you wait a few minutes after the last song mentioned on the CD jacket, "Balloon," ends, there's hidden track 33, a jazzy tune with dreamlike tone and a child laughing and periodically speaking the Spanish word for moon, "luna."

The tracks between "Balloon" and track 33 are empty 10-second fillers. The band played its first show at 3:33 p.m. on May 13 at CD World.

Threes are a big deal to the Moon Box. So is the moon.

The moon is everywhere on the album, and the artists are careful not to say too much about its specific meaning. Same goes for 3s, unless you'd like to talk metaphysics. Members say they would like listeners to find their own meaning in the songs.

Rebecca Teran, Jami's younger sister, sings lead vocals on most songs. Jami harmonizes with Rebecca and takes the lead on one track that she and Daniel penned together: "Play Me."

The record is joyful, positive and poetic. It sounds like what falling in love feels like. And that's how the Moon Box began; when Jami met Daniel and they fell in love.

Before it was a band, the moon box was their house and their recording studio. But it also was a state of mind.

"When people ask what a moon box is, the answer is that it can be anything beautiful or anyone that lives for beauty," Daniel says. "The moon box is everything that a person believes is a moon box."

You might wonder what it was like for the younger sister to walk into such a blissed-out wonder world of love and its expression.

"It's very healing to make music and to be around people in love," Rebecca says.

Later in the interview at the Teran-Gallo home in downtown Eugene, the pair recall their meeting. They were high school teachers, and they were at an impromptu mandatory meeting in the Churchill library when both had other places they had planned to be.

He stared at her shoes. She caught an eyeful of his profile. After the meeting, they spoke for the first time.

"It was love at first sight," Jami Teran-Gallo says. "I got in the car and I was blown away."

"See what I mean?" Rebecca chimes in. "My face hurts right now from smiling."

Sisters' voices are natural blend

You could trace the beginnings of the Moon Box back to the song "Twist My Beautiful," which Daniel wrote and had Rebecca sing as a birthday surprise last February for Jami.

But the real work on the album began last summer. Daniel and Jami had worked on many of the songs, Daniel says, singing them around the house and listening to rough mixes on road trips.

Rebecca came over one day and sang "Catalina" for the first time. Everyone says they felt the chemistry between the two sisters' voices.

"When we sat back and listened to it we felt a tickle in our toes," Daniel writes in an e-mail.

That day sent the project forward, and all three worked hard on it. Rebecca and Daniel both are fans of multiple takes to get the right sound.

Daniel played most of the instruments on the album, with the exception of three guests. For the live shows, multi-instrumentalists Anthony McCarthy and Conant Townsend will join the family to re-create the sounds from the album. The most recent addition is Carl Sundquist on bass.

Daniel wrote the songs, but he considers himself to be more of a conduit than a writer. He says the songs are autobiographical representations of "life within the moon box."

He wrote the title track, `33 Songs," in one sitting after a magical experience in San Cristobal, in Mexico's southern Chiapas state. He and Jami had rented an inexpensive but charming room with many windows. They watched the moon cross the sky, appearing in each subsequent window, throwing light patterns all over the room.

The songs on the album interact with each other, with word choices that are poetic and intimate. Do you need to know what a "homeless balloon" is to the family to enjoy the album? The musicians say no.

"It's about what people think it's about," Daniel says.

CAPTION(S):

Rebecca Teran sings lead vocals on most of the songs on the Moon Box's CD. The moon is prominent in the band's work.