Talk about your cosmic coincidences.

For most bands, it would be enough of an honour to learn that one of your songs had been chosen to wake the astronauts aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery.

But for John Convertino -- co-founder of alt-country combo Calexico, whose tune Crystal Frontier was employed in just such a manner in May -- the news is especially appropriate.

"It's pretty amazing because I was born in '63 and I was named after John Glenn," he says from his home in Tucson, Ariz. "My mom had even written a poem about it and sent it to him (Glenn), and he sent a letter back to her congratulating her on a 'successful splashdown.' "

But word of the shuttle-bound wakeup call -- made possible by astronaut Mark Kelly and his wife, Arizona congesswoman Gabrielle Giffords (they're both big Calexico fans, evidently) -- isn't the only big news coming from the band's camp these days.

They've also got a new album to plug -- Carried to Dust, which streets on Sept. 8, and represents the band's attempts to get back to their roots following the less experimental vibe of 2006's Garden Ruin.

"On our last record, we kind of streamlined the songwriting, made the record more compact and left out some of the more ambient, instrumental aspects to the band," Convertino says of the disc, which was their first without any instrumental numbers. "For this record, we put 'em all back in."

It's not that the band wasn't happy with Garden Ruins, an album that's about as close to straightahead rock as they've ever come (and certainly a far cry from their trademark "indie-mariachi" sound).

It's just that -- after stripping away all their sonic accoutrements -- they felt they'd gotten the experiment out of their system, says Convertino.

"We wanted to do something different -- use a different producer and go for a different sound, and just get out of Tucson for a while," he explains. "But even while we were doing that, we were still loving to do the ambient music and to experiment with jazz and we still played instrumentals. We just wanted to have a record that was more song-oriented than this kind of music for a film that doesn't exist."

As usual, the Calexico crew (Convertino started the band in the mid-'90s with friend and frontman Joey Burns) rounded up an eclectic cast of collaborators for Carried to Dust, among them buddy Sam Beam (aka folksinger-songwriter Iron & Wine), who first paired with the band on their 2005 EP In the Reins.

"We've stayed in pretty good touch throughout the years ... so there's a pretty close relationship there, friendship-wise and musically, too," Convertino says of Beam. "When we were doing that song (House of Valparaiso), Joey kept saying how he thought Sam would sound good on this, and I kept saying we should get him to do it. But it wasn't until we were actually mixing the record that Sam had tome to break away and do it."

And while he doesn't want to give too much away, Convertino does confirm the new disc is a concept record of sorts, one with a coastal feel to it -- "like standing on the edge of the Earth and looking out into a massive ocean," as he puts it.

"We work in that old-school way, where we pay close attention to sequencing and time signatures and what key the songs are in, so we can try to make sure it's a cohesive album with a common thread running through it," he says. "These days, it's getting harder for people to capture that feeling, mostly because our attention spans are ever-dwindling."