Photo courtesy of studio3z

Garrison shown on tour with the Wading Girl in Cincinnati.

The end of a band can be like an existential crisis. It can feel even stranger if you just fell into the project.

That's the situation Roanoke Valley musician Sarah Garrison found herself in last May, when the Wading Girl broke up.

The popular band's core members -- Billy Wallace, Garrison and Josh Eernisse -- had written, recorded and traveled together for five years. But Wallace and Garrison had ended their longtime relationship. Eernisse had gotten married and decided to settle down.

For Wallace, moving on was simple, at least from a musical standpoint. He made a solo record and has been touring hard. For Garrison, a singer/pianist and accordionist, it was a little different. She hadn't really set out to make music her life.

"When the Wading Girl split up, there was definitely this moment of, oh god, now what am I going to do," Garrison said. "I got involved in that band because they already were my friends ... and they asked me if I'd like to participate. So when it ended ... it was an opportunity for me to find out whether I did that because I love those people and that's what they love doing, or had they helped me find something that I didn't really know about myself."

Almost immediately, she got an interesting offer.

Jerry Duncan had started a band project to back up some Roanoke aerial artists, hula hoopers and dancers, and asked Garrison if she would like to play accordion with the act. She went for it. The group, calling itself The Circus Band, will be playing Sunday night at Kirk Avenue Music Hall.

It's part of a triple bill with Jake Winstrom, a member of Knoxville, Tenn., indie rockers Tenderhooks, and a Hollins University-based acoustic duo called The Judys.

"We were practicing with the dancers for a while, and that was really fun, but it's totally distracting when there are gorgeous women dangling from the ceiling when you are trying to write and rehearse music, as you might imagine," Garrison said, laughing, of The Circus Band. "It was really awesomely distracting. So we took ourselves out of that and we've been practicing separately."

The Sunday night show will be band only, but Garrison said the dancers will be on hand, so there might be some impromptu action.

"We have almost no vocals, because this is dance music, you know," she said. "So even from one song from the next, it can be quite different, too. It's been really fun. Some of [the songs] are jazzier, some of them are more sort of jam-on, and others are really sort of avant, sort of electronic crazy."

Garrison also has a solo show coming up, her first ever, on Thursday. She'll open up the latest Emerging Artist Series event at the Roanoke Main Library. While visitors look at art from Heather Leisch and T. Dell Robinette, Garrison and The Model Citizens, an underground hip-hop act from Washington, will perform.

Garrison plans to play three or four songs, including an early Wading Girl cut, "8th of November," plus a couple of her own original tunes. Joining her for part of the short set will be multi-instrumentalist Camellia Delk, a onetime member of the Wading Girl who is also part of The Circus Band, singer Katie Westermann and The Circus Band's Claire Nicolas.

It's easier now for Garrison to look back at her experiences with her first band. Everyone is on good terms, she said, and she performed on a cut on Wallace's latest record, "The Road Spit Me Out." Wallace is on the road this week, touring behind the record, which is available on iTunes.

"We played 16 states, I think," Garrison said of the Wading Girl. "We did Canada. We traveled for five years. It was wonderful."

Though she wasn't sure she wanted to continue with music, her new gig is showing her that she does. She's learning a lot from The Circus Band.

"And it's definitely something that I have, that's in me and something that I'm interested in developing further, even without [the Wading Girl] in my life," she said.

It wasn't a desperate decision, either.

"I took the summer off, gardened and promised I wouldn't freak out about what I was doing," Garrison said. "And now it's not summer anymore, so I'm allowed to start kinda freaking out. Right?"

Then she laughed, like anyone would upon realizing that her life really is centered on music.