Dan's Papers - June 5, 2009

Led by the harmonica wielding vocalist John Popper, Blues Traveler, a rock outfit that's been around since the late 1980s and has roots in the second wave of jam bands as well as the blues and psychedelic rock genres, will be heading to Westhampton Beach Performing Arts Center on June 12.

The band is still heavily promoting its most recent album, last August's North Hollywood Shootout, with its first single "You, Me and Everything" and "Forever Owed" to be released as the next single this week, said keyboardist Ben Wilson. So expect the band to pull heavily from that record for its set list. But have no fear, longtime fans can expect to hear the hits - such as "Runaround" and "Hook," both off the group's Grammy-winning album four, as well as the catchy "But Anyway" - in addition to the new tunes. "We'll provide a good balance of our repertoire," he said. "People always expect to hear the hits. We don't want them to feel like we're just playing the new record. We're giving people a dose of everything."

The band, which formed in Princeton, New Jersey, is known for its improvisational nature and playing off one another in a live setting. "We love showing off our chops as a band," Wilson said. "When we're in the studio, you get a sense that we're good players, but we don't get to play around as much." For this reason, he says, the group is more comfortable on stage and relishes the spontaneity of live performances.

Typically, when the band prepared to record a new album in the past, the guys would hole themselves up somewhere for a month or so to write the material they'd eventually bring into the studio with them. For the most recent album, the band started out with this approach, arming itself with a wealth of material to record. "But we hardly drew from that material," Wilson said. Instead, once Blues Traveler entered the studio it eschewed its tried and true method for one that would better capture the spontaneity of its live sound. "We wrote songs each day in the studio. Someone would come in with a kernel of an idea and we'd put on a pot of coffee and listen to these ideas and jam. Sometimes we'd end up five miles from where we started; sometimes we'd wind up 100 miles away. But we drew more from our ability to improvise, that ability to think quickly." And thus North Hollywood Shootout - which refers both to a real-life incident that took place in the late '90s as well as the band's rapid-fire creative process - was born.

Popper summed up the reasoning behind the band's switch in its creative process for this album perfectly, Wilson says. "John said that sometimes the whole rehashing of ideas over and over again makes a song lose its energy, it takes the fun out of playing it... It's not as exciting as it could be. We wanted to harness that quick creative energy without playing the songs to death. There are some tunes on there that sparkle with that energy."

Blues Traveler will be playing at WHBPAC on June 12 at 8 p.m. Tickets are $110/$90/$35. For more information about the show, go to whbpac.org. To learn more about the band, go to bluestraveler.com.