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It started off as a joke — Warm in the Wake vocalist/guitarist Chris Rowell suggested, in jest, that producer Colin Cobb master the band’s most recent album, “American Prehistoric,” at the legendary Abbey Road Studios.

As it turned out, Cobb put in a call to the London institution, and within a few days, the rough tapes of “American Prehistoric” were on their ways overseas. It’s a fitting finale for the group’s record, which indirectly pays homage to The Beatles, the gods of popular music who made Abbey Road so famous.

“We tried to do some mastering here in (Atlanta), but it didn’t really work out,” Rowell told The Daily Times this week. “We started looking at some different options, and really, almost as a joke, I said, ‘Find out what the deal is with Abbey Road.’ Well, he called, and they answered right away. Steve Rooke (Abbey Road engineer) said he was going on vacation but that he had two days, so he ended up doing the record.

“That was mind-blowing to us. He did the masters and sent us samples over the Internet, and we would go over it song by song, but we never had to make any changes.”

The result is a sunny, shiny indie pop album that crackles with harmony and melody. It works its way under the skin via such songs as “Pawn Shop Heart” and the title track, both of which bounce gently on waves generated by keyboard flourishes and Rowell’s upbeat vocals. It’s a gem of a record, one of those rare finds that reinforces the fact that The Beatles, while setting the benchmark for popular music, are still the best idols a rock ’n’ roller can have.

“We have pretty broad influences, but we all really, really love The Beatles,” Rowell said. “I had kind of a unique experience with writing songs; I grew up playing bass, and when I came to Atlanta, that was the first time I ever played guitar, so my songwriting stems from a lot of simpler song structures. The rest of the guys went to school and studied all these jazz and symphonic pieces, so they have a broader musical vocabulary than I do.

“My songs are more like those by Bob Dylan and Neil Young. I think most of our songs, people could strum the chords on an acoustic guitar after the first few listens. But what happens is that we add in these little time shifts, these elements here and there like little spatial sounds, and we turn them into something different than just a standard song.”

The band’s roots date back to Birmingham, Ala., where Rowell and drummer James Taylor Jr. went to school together. In 1997, Rowell moved to Atlanta and helped found the band King Lear Jet. Taylor and bassist Andy Barker would eventually come on board, and the band released an album that saw several songs licensed to the television network Fox, which used the music as a soundtrack on such shows as “Felicity” and “Dawson’s Creek.”

Keyboard player Daniel Barker, Andy’s brother, was added to the lineup, and the band members retired the King Lear Jet name and opted to pursue a new moniker — Warm in the Wake. The band hooked up with Livewire Recordings last year and released an EP, “Gold Dust Trail,” earlier this year. “American Prehistoric” followed a few months later.

“I knew we were playing out live a lot more than we ever had when we went in to record ‘American Prehistoric,’” Rowell said. “We went in and did track recording for the EP, and we liked the effects we achieved doing it that way, but the new album was mostly done in Colin’s studio, where we could all sort of look at each other while we recorded.

“All the basic tracks were recorded live, which was easier to do because we had been playing out live a lot more. It kind of kept us on our game a little more, and since then, we’ve definitely evolved even more.”

Already, the band is looking ahead to the next album. As an indie band that tours pretty much continuously, the members try to make an effort to write and record new material, to keep themselves from growing board as much as to please fans.

“It does get tiring, playing the same songs over and over, so we adjust our sets accordingly to make things work,” Rowell said. “One of the things we realized is that one of the things that’ll keep us going is to stay in the studio, to get new ideas hashed out. Over the last couple of weeks, we’ve been recording new songs, and that breathes life into what we’re doing.

“We’re not really shooting for a particular thing when we go about it as far as a writing and recording side goes. I’m always trying to write new songs, and we’ll get together and play them in front of an audience before we go in to record them. That helps us realize what needs to be dropped or added, and that way, the songs sort of evolve on their own.”

Saturday, Warm in the Wake returns to downtown Knoxville for another show at Preservation Pub, on Market Square. On previous occasions, the band happened to be booked while festivals were going on downtown, which made the band’s arrival interesting, to say the least.

“We had two of the longest load-ins we’ve ever had — loading in several blocks away and carrying equipment through a bunch of cotton candy vendors and jugglers,” he said, chuckling. “It’s always been really fun, though, because everybody’s already in a really festive mood.”