Denver’s enduring and globally adored chamber rockers will play homage to the film that changed its trajectory before Monday’s screening at Red Rocks.

On a hot July afternoon in 2002, I gathered with members of the band DeVotchKa on the patio of a north Boulder bar to tell them the serendipitous news: A poll of 47 local music experts had declared these seductive chamber-rocking outcasts the underground local band most deserving of more mainstream recognition. They had shot all the way to the top from No. 6 the year before.

“It’s definitely one way to move up: Murder the competition,” Tom Hagerman deadpanned.

Frontman Nick Urata, the hauntingly handsome frontman I once called “the physical impersonation of perpetual heartbreak,” joked about the terminology: “Underground band,” he said with a laugh, “is a nice way of saying, ‘hanging on by a thread.’” 

Fast forward 24 years and Urata is talking with me from Los Angeles about Monday’s upcoming Film on the Rocks concert and 20th anniversary screening of “Little Miss Sunshine,” the breakout indie darling that catapulted DeVotchKa onto the global stage in 2006.

Everything about DeVotchKa is new and old, intoxicating and sobering, disturbing and mesmerizing all at once. It’s the name – taken from Anthony Burgess’ 1962 dystopian masterpiece “A Clockwork Orange” (when the protopunk droog Alex blurts out his desire for “a little of the old in-out on a weepy young devotchka”). It’s Shawn King’s bright trumpet flourishes. It’s bassist Jeanie Schroder and the pageantry of her light-up sousaphone. It’s Hagerman bounding from Romani-inspired violin to accordion, piano and melodica. It’s Urata wailing and weaving effortlessly from bouzouki to theremin. Together, they conjure a cinematic, dreamlike sound that makes DeVotchKa feel as if it exists just outside ordinary time.

I ask Urata: Say we’re back on that Boulder patio in 2002, and I could somehow tell you what was coming: “How it Ends” – the plaintive song filmmakers Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris happened to hear on a Santa Monica radio station and instantly recognized as the sonic heartbeat of their developing film, “Little Miss Sunshine.” … The invitation to co-compose the score despite no cinematic experience. … The $100 million box-office return. … A Grammy nomination … Opening for Muse before 80,000 in Paris … Scoring “Crazy Stupid Love,” “Paddington,” “Lemony Snicket” and more … Recording with the Colorado Symphony from Red Rocks … This present national tour celebrating the enduring legacy of “Little Miss Sunshine.”

“What would you have said to me?” I asked.

“Yeah, I would’ve thought you were crazy,” Urata said.

Hey, two things can be true.

“It is hard to put into words,” he said. “It’s not like I’m sitting here on a red velvet couch or resting on my laurels, because the struggle never leaves you. You’re always onto the next thing, even after you’ve done something cool.

“Of course, I had high hopes for our future back then, but I was never all that positive about it. Sometimes, when I’m feeling down, I do wish I could go back to my 20-year-old self, back when I was getting kicked out of bands or just struggling to get along, and tell him that some good things are coming your way.”

Hold, please: Getting kicked out of bands? Urata laughs. This was back in mid-1990s Chicago.

“So, I was always trying to get bands going, and I thought I was really excited about this one group. I was the singer, and we were actually out playing shows. But then the guys who hired me kicked me out because their friend moved back into town, and they wanted him to be in the band. So it was very kind of unceremonious.”

This is not “How it Ends.”

Urata was soon delivering pizzas, distraught and thinking his life as a musician was over. “Then I got a call to this address,” he said. “I knocked on the door, and there were three guys in there jamming out.

“I was like, ‘Hey, I got your pizza.’ And they were like, ‘Whoa, we didn’t order pizza.’”

They would have ordered a guitar player had that been on the menu, because that’s what they needed. Urata joined in the next night. They were The Rekers. And all of that was leading to Urata moving to Colorado and starting DeVotchKa in 1997. Next year will be the band’s 30th, with no lineup changes this century. 

Points Urata still ponders? “Something in the universe ordered that pizza,” he said. But who? Or what? And was extra cheese involved?

Nostalgia is having a moment in the summer of 2026. Several major bands are hitting the road celebrating milestone anniversaries of seminal albums. We saw it last month with Bright Eyes playing “I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning” and “Digital Ash in a Digital Urn” at Red Rocks. My Chemical Romance will be playing “The Black Parade” in full on Aug. 27 at Coors Field. Pallbearer will revisit “Foundations of Burden” on Sept. 18 at the Marquis Theatre.

DeVotchKa will be playing its tribute to the music of “Little Miss Sunshine” across the U.S., Mexico, the U.K. and Europe, culminating Oct. 30-31 at the Stanley Hotel’s 8th Annual Costume Ball in Estes Park.

Urata is all in. The Balkan Bard, it turns out, is a sentimental guy when it comes to “Little Miss Sunshine.”

“It seems like someone has brought it up to me almost every day for the past 20 years,” he said. “And I love that, because it was something that we were really lucky to be a part of. People stop me all the time and tell me how much that film and that music meant to them. The fact that it makes people so happy is just a joy to me, and I fully embrace that. It gives our whole story a little bit more meaning. A little more substance.”  

Especially given the vagaries of an industry where no one is ever promised anything.

“We got turned down by I think almost every record label there is,” Urata said. So the band burned “How it Ends” onto handmade CDs with the band’s name written in Sharpie. Urata gave a copy to some guy he met at a random music festival in Colorado. But that guy spun for a public radio station in L.A. – and he played it. The married film directors heard it and had a crew member track down the band, which was fortuitously visiting L.A. at the time.

“They clandestinely came to see us at a show,” Urata said, though it’s hard to be clandestine when you are two of the only four people who show up.

But in that room was the precise intersection of the right band with the right song with first-time directors who shared perfectly matching musical sensibilities. Improbably, Urata and the directors were soon sending tracks back and forth, and Denver’s very own DeVotchKa was somehow the official co-scorers of a landmark American tragicomedy about a fractured, dysfunctional family traveling across the American Southwest in a Volkswagen bus to support a young girl’s dream of competing in a child beauty pageant.

The film was a massive commercial and critical success. We’re talking a $92 million return on an $8 million budget. A Grammy nomination. Two Oscars.

After nearly a decade busking on street corners and backing local burlesque shows, DeVotchKa transformed overnight. The band was signed to a prestigious indie label Anti-Records (with clients like Tom Waits and Nick Cave). Their next album, “A Mad and Faithful Telling,” shot to No. 9 on the Billboard Heatseekers chart. (“Little Miss Sunshine” star Greg Kinnear even played the glockenspiel on one track.) The band was soon courted to play big music festivals like Coachella, Bonnaroo and Lollapalooza. And for Urata, it all spun off into a second career – now having scored more than 25 films.

To think: America’s embrace of that quintessential VW bus meant DeVotchKa would never again have to struggle out of a van. All it took was years of relentless hard knocks … and the most remarkable combustion of luck and unlikely cosmic forces.

I asked Urata how he squares the band’s well-earned success with the critical benevolent intervention of such kindly fates.

“I just figured there were so many breaks I had never gotten before then, that the movie was the one the universe was saving up for me,” Urata said. “That was the one that really did change the trajectory of our lives.”

So: What was it about that song?

“The directors came from a music-video background, and they obviously have a very cool and eclectic taste in music,” Urata said. “They told us it was the sadness in the song that attracted them to it. And I definitely could see that, because that’s pretty much exactly what our music is all about. But the thing is: out of sadness comes this irreverent joy. And it’s in that joy that you truly know you’re alive. That’s sort of the theme of the movie. Does that make sense? Did I distill it right?”

Perfectly.

“Little Miss Sunshine” was something the movies had never quite seen before: An indie band and an indie film joining forces and changing the form, if not the world.

“All in all, it was kind of a once-in-a-lifetime experience,” Urata said.

One whose roads all lead back to Colorado and Monday’s party at Red Rocks, a sacred space where DeVotchKa has come of age in more than a dozen concerts since 2008.

“Red Rocks feels different every time,” Urata said. “The weather’s different. The light is different. The energy’s different. Red Rocks is kind of like this living, breathing monument. It’s definitely got a life of its own.”

And what will definitely be different on Monday is that DeVotchKa is the opening act for the film, which Urata thinks is pretty cool.

“We’re hoping we can get people excited, get them in a good mood, open up their hearts with a little music – and then finish them off with the iconic film,” he said.

This all seems like the perfect way for this particular arc of the band’s journey to culminate – in a cresting wave of nostalgia, accomplishment and gratitude. For what was, and for what almost never was.

Pretty much any time I’ve interviewed anyone from DeVotchKa, they seem to bring it all back to that north Boulder patio in 2002, giving exaggerated significance to a poll that brought them some unexpected attention and encouragement – and a headlining slot at the nascent Underground Music Showcase I was starting at the time through The Denver Post.

“We always get nostalgic about being asked to play at that first UMS, and the article that came with it,” Urata said. “Those were the days when every show is do or die. On the flip side, sometimes all it takes is that one spark of validation from the people who love to write about music, and you’re off to the races. Or, in our case, the Grammys. That’s what the first UMS did for us. When it felt like it could all fall apart at any moment, those little successes were like a spark that kept us going all these years.”

‘Little Miss Sunshine’/Film on the Rocks

• When: Monday, July 15

• Where: Red Rocks, Morrison

• Time: Entertainment begins at 6:30 p.m.; film to follow

• Pre-show performances by Wheelchair Sports Camp and DeVotchKa, emceed by Janae Burris

• Tickets: $25

• Info: axs.com