There's a brief pause after the phone stops ringing, and a deep voice says, "Welcome to the Wormdogs' hotline." Options follow: I can leave the band a message, order its members a pizza (vegetarian, if you please) or listen to some jazz — a strange choice, as the five-piece Vermont band does not play jazz. "Will came into practice one day with a big grin and told us to dial the number 802-WORMDOG," bassist Braden Lalancette said as he and his bandmates, including drummer Will Pearl, spoke with me on Zoom recently. "And there it was! It was a hilarious surprise." Lalancette, Pearl, Danica Cunningham (fiddle), Eric Soszynski (guitar) and Nick Ledak (guitar) formed bluegrass-rock band the Wormdogs in 2017 and released their debut LP, Doggin Is My Business, the following year. Several other albums followed, but something about their new, self-titled LP has the group thinking outside the box. Case in point: starting a hotline to promote the record. "In a lot of ways, this feels like our first record," Lalancette said. "We certainly haven't made an album this way before," Cunningham seconded. "We wanted to stretch the band's legs. We bought a band van, but it usually doesn't get too far out of New England. So we packed it up and headed south." For their fourth album, due out on Friday, December 6, the Wormdogs traveled to New Orleans to record at Bigtone Records, with fellow Vermont musician and producer Eric George at the helm. The experience not only helped the bandmates form a deeper bond — the roughly 1,600-mile trek gave them ample time — but ushered in new methods of recording. The Wormdogs recorded most of the new LP live, cutting the songs together in the same room and going straight to tape — something they didn't do with past releases. "In the past, we didn't quite know what we wanted to sound like," Pearl admitted. "But we've gotten better at it over the years, especially after the Cookin' With records." Cookin' With, Vols. 1 and 2, saw the band collaborating with such Vermont musicians as Lily Seabird, Honey & Soul, and the Larkspurs. "It was an incredible experience for us," Lalancette said. "We set up a studio in Danica's house with Eric [George], and each morning we'd have a different person show up with a song." The process helped the Wormdogs figure out exactly…