To anyone who’s ever spent weeks on the road in a cramped tour van, Jeremy Ruzumna’s career arc is proof that you need to be careful about what you wish for.

Before signing on with Los Angeles–spawned Fitz and the Tantrums, the keyboardist enjoyed a pretty fantastic career as a behind-the-scenes musician. A Grammy-nominated songwriter, he collaborated with everyone from Bootsy Collins and the Black Eyed Peas to Rod Stewart and Wynonna Judd. When not working on songs that helped sell over 18 million albums, Ruzumna toured with the likes of Macy Gray, enjoying the relatively stress-free life that comes with playing in the band of a multiplatinum artist.

Somewhere along the line, though, Ruzumna decided that he wanted something more—even though he was also determined to spend more time at home, hanging with his wife and indulging in his passion for cooking.

“I think me joining Fitz and the Tantrums was a testimony to how much faith I had in Fitz and the band right from the beginning,” the keyboardist says, on the line from L.A. “Around the time this band formed, one of my main goals was to not be on the road anymore at all. It’s ironic—my original goal for getting involved in the band was to do more commercial studio work. Fitz at the time had a commercial-music company, but, unbeknownst to me, he was folding it to try and make this band work.”

Having seen enough of the business from behind the curtain, Ruzumna was convinced that Fitz—a.k.a. singer Michael Fitzpatrick—was onto something with a sound that mixed keyboard-soaked ’80s electro-pop with classic ’60s soul. If not, the singer and retro-fashion-forward frontman wouldn’t have walked away from his own studio-based career as an in-demand sound engineer.

“I really liked the material and the vibe,” Ruzumna relates. “The reaction that we got from the audience, right from the very first shows, was kind of staggering. We’ve all been in a bunch of bands, and I have to say, truthfully, the response to what we’re doing has been shocking. That gave me enough faith to go, ‘All right, I’ll get in the van for a week.’ Then it would be ‘Um, how about next month? Can you get in the van for two weeks?’ Then it was ‘Can you spend two months in the van?’ And by that point, we were all-in.”

Fitz and the Tantrums didn’t take long to graduate from cramped vans, as the group’s reputation as a shit-hot live act quickly led to tour buses, festival invites from both sides of the Atlantic, and headliner billing at North American soft-seaters. Along the way, they’ve broken out of the retro-soul box that many put the group into after its 2010 debut album, Pickin’ Up the Pieces.

“It’s funny—I don’t think that the first album truly sounded Motown or retro,” Ruzumna offers. “To me, it was like a new-wave band wrote some Motown-ish songs and had them produced in the golden age of hip-hop. My personal theory is that the cover art dictated what people thought of the album, because the art was so ’60s-looking.”

That’s not a problem with Fitz and the Tantrums, whose cover art is a hand that’s been decorated with glowing white, blue, and purple neon bars. That acts as a setup for the direction the band takes on its third outing. Traces of ’60s Motor City surface in dance-floor burners “Fadeback” and “Burn It Down”, but Ruzumna and his bandmates continue to prove their influences don’t end at Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye. Fitz and the Tantrums aim for the cheap seats with the raging stadium rocker “HandClap” and serve up old Japanese new wave on “Roll Up”.

“It’s really interesting how we were pegged as Motown-retro back in the day,” Ruzumna says. “We always knew we weren’t just one thing, because of all of our influences. A lot of times, your audience wants to keep you in one certain box, and it would have been really easy to come out with three albums of the same material. But we want to keep it interesting for ourselves, and hopefully interesting for our fans.”

Fitz and the Tantrums play the Vogue Theatre on Wednesday (August 24).