With a couple of wild experiences in the Last Frontier already under its belt, the acclaimed hillbilly band The Wilders is set to return to Alaska for an even wilder adventure - as headliners of the 10th annual Pelican Boardwalk Boogie.

"It's scary," lead vocalist and guitarist Ike Sheldon said of the five-day music festival that begins May 22. "There's no telling what's gonna happen out there, you know, on an island in the middle of nowhere with a bunch of crazy people. Hang on to your hat."

Fiddle player Betse Ellis said the band has established a deep connection with the state after touring in Alaska the past two years. She said the band has had some wild experiences in Alaska, but is unsure what's in store for them when they arrive at the infamous Pelican Boardwalk Boogie.

"From the stories I've heard I can't decide whether to be excited or scared," Ellis said. "Maybe a little bit of both. After the first time we came to Alaska we realized it's a whole other world up there anyway. From the reports - as vague as they may be - about what Pelican is like I'm thinking we're going to be in for even more surprises."

The Wilders, a Kansas City, Mo.-based bluegrass/country/old-time band, is also scheduled to perform in a Boogie fundraiser with The Mayday Band - made up of locals Sean Tracey and Maridon Boario and Portland-based musicians Caleb Klauder and Sammy Lind - at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, May 20, at the Juneau Arts & Culture Center. Both bands are also expected to play at the Alaskan Bar & Hotel on the evenings of May 20 and 21.

"It's kind of like gettin' us warmed up for handlin' what's to come," Sheldon said of the fundraiser. "It's like we'll get acclimated, like a decompression chamber or something like that."

Sheldon, Ellis and multi-instrumentalist Phil Wade had been performing together for a couple of years in the Kansas City music scene before bass player Nate Gawron joined the band in 1998. The Wilders began playing a variety of high-energy acoustic songs of varying genres in the local music scene and have since branched out with an international following.

Ellis said the band members have diverse musical backgrounds and have incorporated sounds from rock 'n roll to country and all sorts of places in between.

"People will hear a combination of different genres of music that all very loosely fall under some kind of hillbilly term," she said. "We might play an old-time fiddle tune, like a barn burner kind of thing, and then we might play a Jimmie Rodgers song, and then we'll go into Johnny Cash, and then we'll do our own stuff."

The Wilders are not a fusion band by any means, says Ellis, but it writes and performs songs that are different from much of what's out there.

"I think it's sort of like a four-headed monster when we get together because the elements, the sum, is kind of greater than it's parts," she said. "We play together as a band. We're not in it for individual glory. We're very serious about what we do, but we don't take ourselves too seriously."

Both Sheldon and Ellis said the band has evolved a lot over the past decade from playing predominantly cover tunes to writing, arranging and performing original songs. The Wilders released its latest album, "Someone's Got to Pay," to critical acclaim last month.

"Our new album is all originals and we kind of turn a lot of things on (their) ear," Sheldon said. "Now that I feel we kind of know the rules, we're kind of ready to break 'em."

The band is also rewriting the rules of the traditional country murder ballad with its five-part musical narrative, "Sittin' on a Jury," based on the sordid true tale of a convicted wife murderer. Wade served on the jury for a trial in 2005 of a young husband in Missouri who fatally shot his wife after she walked out on him.

"It really moved Phil so he wrote this song about it and we didn't know what to do with it because it's kind of long," Sheldon said.

The band split the verses into separate songs that tell the story of the trial from different perspectives, which helped mold the project into a pseudo-concept album, he said.

"That kind of became what the whole album was hung on," Sheldon said. "I don't want to be pretentious or anything, it's kind of a little song cycle that tells a story all the way through. It's pretty cool for us, a really happy accident."

Ellis said the band has grown and developed with the new album and continues to embrace its name in a descriptive sense.

"I think we like to tap into those sides of ourselves that have no restraints, and so when it's time to let go we completely do," she said. "We don't try to be perfectionists in the sense of making every note come out perfectly, we try to let the music take us where it needs to go."