Tim Quirk and Jay Blumenfield have been making music together for more than 40 years, since they were teenagers growing up in Scarsdale, N.Y.

They’ve recorded together as Too Much Joy and Wonderlick, played multiple tours, been sued together (for an unauthorized sample of Bozo the Clown on the original version of the songs “Clowns”) and even been arrested together (for playing 2 Live Crew songs at a Broward County, Fla., club in 1990 to protest the rap act for being charged there with obscenity).

One thing they haven’t done until now is an acoustic tour.

Quirk and Blumenfield are hitting the road for a house tour that includes a show Sunday in Youngstown — buy a $15 ticket (with no additional ticketing fees!) at www.tickettailor.com/events/wonderlick/ and the location of the show will be sent in an email.

“Every few years we put out a Wonderlick album,” Blumenfield said. “The fun of Wonderlick is that we just screw around in the studio and we never intended to figure out how to play it live. It’s a very freeing project. Then we put out this one (2024’s ‘Undisciplined’) and hey, we should do something. These are fun songs. We haven’t played as Wonderlick. I wonder if we could pull off a house tour and just figure out a way to do it acoustically, maybe play with some tracks? It just became us brainstorming something fun to do.

“Tim has taken a couple recent drives cross country and been saying how much fun it was. I haven’t driven cross country since the early days of Too Much Joy. That could be fun, so we put out the word (on social media) and got a lot of response — ‘Yeah, come play in my living room.'”

Over punk and power-pop riffs and some hip hop influence, Too Much Joy’s songs could be smart, they could be funny, and oftentimes they were both. Neither smart nor funny are qualities that are highly valued in popular music, and major labels usually are flummoxed when it comes to figuring out how to sell something that might be both.

Such was the fate of Too Much Joy, which got some airplay in the pre-grunge days of the modern rock radio with songs like “Crush Story,” “Long Haired Guys from England” and “Donna Everywhere,” but not enough to have a long life on Warner Bros. subsidiaries (Giant and Discovery labels).

But those qualities that made it difficult to find mainstream success created an intense loyalty with the listeners who discovered it.

“Too Much Joy doesn’t have a massive audience, but the audience we have loves us massively,” Quirk said.

After releasing almost nothing for two decades, Too Much Joy has put out two albums this decade, 2020’s “Mistakes Were Made” and 2022’s “All These … Feelings,” and did some touring. Quirk described those tours as a logistical nightmare between trying to secure venue dates at a time when every other act was trying to get back out on the road after the COVID-19 layoff and the sheer cost of traveling with a band and crew.

It only worked because many of those loyal fans who bought tickets for the shows also bought tickets for the afterparty to hang with the band.

“I felt guilty about charging people to have a drink with us,” Quirk said. “Not only were they ecstatic to come, but they were literally putting additional cash in our pocket and saying nice things about our band and how meaningful we were in their lives.”

Blumenfield added, “I was dreading how awkward it was going to be, but it was great hanging out with these people who got us. I honestly would have paid them. It was a revelation.”

The house tour eliminates those logistical headaches. There’s no band or crew, just two lifelong friends and some gear. The hosts in each city already have paid them a set fee to come, so they know the tour will be profitable.

The atmosphere is different from dealing with venue operators as well, Quirk said. Performers and club owners have different needs and expectations that aren’t always in sync. Venues host hundreds of acts a year and aren’t excited about any given band beyond the revenue they hope it will generate.

With a house concert it’s, “Do you want Moroccan food or Mexican? What kind of beer would you like? Do you want us to cook you breakfast?,” Quirk said. “The hosts just want you to come and put on a party for their friends and they’re ecstatic to have you.”

And on the drive between shows, Blumenfield and Quirk plan to work on their next batch of songs.

The house tour hadn’t started when the interview took place last week, but Quirk and Blumenfield said the acoustic format already had won over their toughest critics — their wives.

“The first weekend when we were putting the set together, I was coming up with little gimmicks,” Quirk said. “If a song was a little wonky, I could wow with comedy or magic or whatever. By the end of the weekend, we realized we don’t need any gimmicks. The songs actually hold up. It sounds weird to say it was surprising, but without any rhythm tracks, just guitars and voices, the songs are actually solid.

“My wife was basically our audience, and we have the type of relationship where she’d tell me if we sucked. She absolutely would have said, ‘This is a mistake. Cancel the tour. You’re going to embarrass yourself.’ Instead she said, ‘Oh, my God, I’m sad I’m not going to see one of these for real because it’s so good. Jay’s wife was equally surprised. Not only doesn’t it suck, it’s genuinely good and compelling.”

“What’s upsetting about this story, as I hear you tell it, is just how surprised both of our wives are that we didn’t suck,” Blumenfield said.

They will include some Too Much Joy songs, but the setlist will rely heavily on Wonderlick material. Both believe there are songs that benefit from the stripped-down arrangements, such as “Cold Patch” and “16 Year Old Girl.”

More than once during the half-hour conversation, Quirk makes a point of saying he’s not a musician or even a singer and describes himself as “a writer in a band.” Taking these songs down to their bones has been a revelation as a writer — one that should have happened a long time ago, according to his bandmate.

“I’m not a poet, so I cheat a lot when it comes to meter and rhythm,” Quirk said. “If I have a particular meter going but there’s a thought I want to express in a line or a chorus, I will just ignore the meter and cram in the extra syllables. With ’16 Year Old Girl,’ that’s one of the few where I stuck to the same meter all the way through the whole song, and it turns out it makes it easier to sing and funner to sing and it makes the song work when all you have is a voice and a guitar. From now on, I’m not cheating on the meter any more.”

They should have plenty to discuss on those car rides.

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