Twenty years ago, I released my first album on Columbia records. Since that first heady summer of playing festivals, concert halls, state fairs, radio appreciation days, and yes, even sheep dressing contests, I have spent nearly every summer since riding a tour bus.

My road family is made up of band members, crew, drivers and dogs. We travel at night along the interstates of America, fueling up at 4 AM in the diesel- smelling mist of truck stops. The sound of the coach’s engine is the familiar white noise that accompanies our sleep. We ride the roads but the busses and accompanying semi trucks have also boarded ferries that cross Lake Michigan in the dead of night, and also departed the Connecticut coast to deposit us in the beautiful farmlands of western Long Island. I have woken up to see the prairies of Nebraska, feel the hair pin turns of the Rockies, see the shores of the Chesapeake Bay and experience the potholes of the Cross Bronx Expressway during weekday rush hour.

A typical summer tour day goes like this: arriving in the early morning at the venue, we chew up the day with phone calls, business issues, lunch, sound check, dinner and then the show. After the last note is played, we are packed up once more: strings, guitars, piano, rugs, walkie-talkies, lighting rigs, soundboards, monitor wedges, dogs and people. Sometimes the schedule requires that we make a much longer drive between shows. You begin to go a little nuts after 9 or 10 hours, realizing that there may be at least that many more to go.