Blues Traveler preps for more 'Shootout' dates

Blues Traveler will return to the road next month for a US tour behind last summer's "North Hollywood Shootout."

The spring and summer outing, which kicks off May 2 in Tulsa, OK, will crisscross the country three times, stopping by 22 cities over the course of four months, and is currently slated to wrap up Aug. 22 in Columbus, IN. Details are below.

The roadwork comes on the heels of a fall trek that finished up just before Thanksgiving, all in support of "North Hollywood Shootout," which surfaced last August. The band worked with Grammy-winning producer David Bianco (Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers, Ozzy Osbourne) on their 10th studio release and first for their new label, Verve Forecast.

Guitarist Chan Kinchla discussed the album's live-performance vibe with Billboard.com last summer, saying, "When we play live, we get a lot of these great grooves and things going when we do jams in the songs and in-between songs--happy accidents and stuff like that. We felt like that hasn't really been represented on record, so we decided to spend a lot of time just doing free-form jamming and finding parts we liked and using them to build songs around."

The blues-rockers, who became festival and jam-band-circuit regulars following 1994's "Four" and its chart-topping singles "Hook" and "Run-Around," just finished up their first ever Australian tour.