2024 is ending much better than it started for Spirit of the Bear.

The band, which formed a decade ago in Boardman and currently is based in Columbus, spent 2023 working on a new album and playing Nashville’s historic Ryman Auditorium and other prestigious venues as an opening act for Crowded House. It ended in 2023 with a Black Friday show at Westside Bowl.

Instead of touring and spending time in the recording studio as planned, singer and guitar player James Harker started 2024 in doctor’s offices, and the band’s big release this year wasn’t a new album but Harker’s release following a month-long hospital stay.

Harker is healthy and the band — Danny Svenson, keyboards and vocals; Ethan Schwendeman, keyboards; Jamei Vitullo, drums; and Nate Gelfand, bass — is back to playing live. Almost a year to the day of its last gig, Spirit opened for Red Wanting Blue last Saturday in Columbus, and it will be back at Westside Bowl on Friday for its annual day after Thanksgiving / Black Friday show. The Goners and smallboats will open.

Harker said his problems started at the end of last year with fevers and fatigue. In February he was diagnosed with leukemia.

“Then things got complicated,” he said.

After the initial diagnosis, the doctors held off on starting chemotherapy because all of his symptoms didn’t correspond with that blood disease.

“It was just a lot of blood work and a lot of testing for a few months,” Harker said. “Eventually, they were like, ‘OK, we don’t think it’s cancer, but we’re not totally sure what’s going on.’ … I’m getting fevers every day, and it was hard to keep food down and all of this stuff. But they were just like, ‘Hang in there and we’ll keep giving you different tests so we can pull at the right thread and figure out what the right medicine is going to be.’ So it was very frustrating.”

That continued into summer. After a month in the hospital, Harker was diagnosed with HLH, an immune deficiency disorder where white blood cells attack the body’s other cells and organs. It usually is detected in children, not 26-year-old adults.

“They treated me for that in August,” Harker said. “I got treated for that over the course of five weeks and ever since that I have been pretty much back to normal again and able to go out and do everything that I had previously been doing.”

That includes resuming work with his bandmates on a new album. Not surprisingly, the experiences of the last year have had an impact on Harker’s songwriting.

In the past, the band has tried to get away on mini-retreats at a cabin or a secluded location to focus on writing without the other distractions of life. Those sessions produced indie-pop songs that created more of a general feeling or vibe instead of addressing a specific subject

“The songs definitely got more focused,” Harker said. “One song is specifically about the day that they told me I had cancer, and then the feeling of like, ‘OK, actually that’s not true,’ and not knowing what was wrong. And then there is another song very directly about that situation. It feels like it’s a little more — I don’t want to say it’s relatable to everybody because it’s a very specific thing that happened — but it feels a little more concrete, like you hear the lyrics and you’re like, ‘OK, this is clearly about this.'”

That’s not the only thing that impacted the new material. Gelfand started playing bass with the band live in 2022, but Harker was handling the bass parts in the studio. Gelfand joined the band in the studio when it resumed work on the record.

“He was more involved in the writing side of it, so he kind of went back into those earlier songs and changed some of the parts, and that caused me to change some of the production,” Harker said.

The album is in the mixing phase, and Harker said was working on editing the video for the first single before the telephone interview on Monday. The singles should start being released in early 2025, and the band would like to have the album out this summer. Harker said they are about “95% sure” of what the album title will be, but he didn’t want to reveal that just yet.

Those at the Westside Bowl show will get to hear some of the new songs as well as old favorites … in some cases really old favorites.

One of the things wiped out by Harker’s illness was a planned 10th anniversary celebration at Generations Cafe in Columbiana, where the members of Spirit used to play when they were in high school.

“I think we’re going to treat this Black Friday show as some sort of a 10-year acknowledgment thing, and we might play a couple of the super old songs, if we can manage to scrounge them back together, from the high school days and see if anyone still remembers those.”

Harker is just happy for the chance to play for an audience again.

“It was great,” Harker said about last weekend’s show with Red Wanting Blue. “It had been a while since we played together. We’ve been recording a lot, but it had been a while since we actually got to go on stage and do it.

“When we were practicing, I was kind of like, ‘Oh, man, we have to practice a little bit to get our bearings. But once we got to the show with our sound guy and we had our in-ears mix, we kind of locked in … OK, this feels comfortable again.”

If you go…

WHO: Spirit of the Bear, The Goners and smallboats

WHEN: 8 p.m. Friday

WHERE: Westside Bowl, 2617 Mahoning Ave., Youngstown

HOW MUCH: Tickets are $12 in advance through Eventbrite and $15 at the door.