Travis' Fran Healy, Andy Dunlop to write album on tour

Inspired by "On the Road" author Jack Kerouac and the lure of the open road, Travis lead singer Fran Healy and guitarist Andy Dunlop are preparing to tour the US while writing music for the Scottish alt-rock band's next album. The jaunt also serves as a way of celebrating Travis' music.

"But the whole subtext of the whole thing is that we're going to try to write an album while we're touring so we can go and record next year," said Healy, via telephone from Berlin, where he now lives with his family. "We want to get the writing totally done on this tour, which is quite a toll, but I think it's possible."

Healy said he always wanted to travel across the United States and try to write a record.

"So, I thought, 'Why don't we take our acoustics and go from venue to venue and then on our downtime try and do a little [writing] here and there and see what we can get together?'" Healy recalled.

The tour is dubbed "A Chronological Acoustical Journey Through The Travis Back Catalogue: Laugh Out Loud Stories, Scottish Accents, Handsome Scottish Men, Naked Torsos." The trip was inspired by a last-minute gig that Healy did in Austria. Initially, he was told he had to perform for 10 minutes. Instead, he arrived at the venue only to be informed he needed to play for an hour.

"So I thought, 'We need to have some structure,'" Healy said. "'Let's start with the first song I wrote and end with the last song I wrote, put it all together and make it in chronological order.' It was so successful that people were flipping out. The radio station who was co-promoting it got the most e-mails and calls all about this show, saying it was fantastic. I thought, 'This is a good idea. We should do this properly like a proper tour.' It was nice to have an idea and actually see it go to light."

Healy is ready to draw from an extensive catalog of songs that he has written over six Travis albums and numerous EPs and B-sides, ranging from early hits like "All I Want To Do Is Rock" and "Why Does It Always Rain On Me" to songs from more recent releases like "Sing," "Closer," "J. Smith" and the hundred or so songs in between.

Healy explained that fans will find the setlist curious. The first song he officially wrote and finished was a track called "20" that he penned when he was 19. But before then, there were "trickles" of songs that fans may find familiar.

"'She's So Strange,' which is on 'The Man Who,' was one of those songs," Healy said. "Before that, there's another song called 'Safe,' which is on 'The Invisible Band.' It's kind of odd that these songs ended up on albums 10 years later. The first song just kind of popped out. That's kind of cool, isn't it?

"I like to know where songs were written. I like to know how they were written and why they were written. If you come to the show, you'll find out all these things. It's like a lecture. The whole set up is going to be kind of like a lecture. We're going to get a slide projector and a screen, and I'm going to set up the little projector and show pictures and diagrams and have little voiceovers and try to make it as cute as possible. It's kind of like a town hall lecture."

Many of the shows are sold out. That surprises Healy somewhat.

"All the shows are modest size," Healy said. "But there's always a worry. We've toured this year already in America so to ask people to come out again and spend more money to see you is a big ask, considering the current climate. With that in mind, I really want to do the best possible gig we can get."