For Port Hadlock band member Chris Miller, the return of The Faux Paws to the Palindrome at Eaglemount Cidery on Jan. 21 represents more than just another chance to perform music he enjoys, with fellow musicians whom he appreciates. After all, he plays “pretty regularly” throughout Port Townsend and Chimacum, both solo and alongside other local musical artists.

Rather, Miller regards The Faux Paws as “a hugely important part of my own musical identity,” having played with them for 13 years, he’s excited to share that side of himself, and those significant partnerships he’s forged, with what’s become his hometown audience.

“I’ve only lived in Washington state for about six years, and in the Port Townsend area for only three of those years, so in some ways, it still feels like I just got here,” Miller said. “Meanwhile, the other guys in The Faux Paws live in Vermont, so it’s always great when I can connect with them again.”

The acoustic trio formed when brothers Andrew and Noah VanNorstrand, who toured the country for 18 years in the band Great Bear, met Miller at a music camp in their former home state of New York, and the trio developed what Miller, who’d grown up in Florida, described as an “incredible musical synergy.”

Miller had already honed an affinity and skill for bluegrass and jazz, even before he’d played with the Grammy-nominated cajun-country band The Revelers, so the VanNorstrand brothers credited him with bringing “a welcome interruption of (our) old habits.”

Andrew VanNorstrand described Miller as “a musical chameleon,” whose multi-instrumental versatility is coupled with such a “big-picture” vision that, according to Andrew, “it’s irrelevant what instrument he ends up picking, because whatever he plays is so right.”

According to Matthew Miner of Rainshadow Concerts, which is hosting The Faux Paws at the Palindrome, the trio borrows elements of bluegrass, old-time, Celtic, folk, Americana and jazz, without fully belonging to any of those genres.

The Faux Paws are “dynamic, exciting, sincere, irreverent, infectious and surprising,” Miner said. “They move deftly between moods, influences and instruments, (while) always maintaining a groove that pulses through the music like a heartbeat.”

Indeed, as much as their currently distant homes keep them apart, Miller credited The Faux Paws’ frequent tours across the country with enriching them musically.

“Ironically, one of the things that’s always brought us together has been our shared love of travel,” Miller said. “And a lot of the music we play is placed-based music, as we savor the natural beauty of the places we’ve been to. Noah wrote this waltz that was so evocative of this area’s dark gray-green water and swelling waves that I said, ‘We have to name that after the Salish Sea.’”

Miller concurred with Miner’s characterization of the band’s sound, as diversely influenced as it is, as “musically impossible to describe or sum up in any kind of marketable way,” by insisting that “you have to hear us to understand us, which is what makes music so magical in the first place. So take a chance and check us out.”