Traveling is my favorite part of being a musician by trade. The airports are droll and unavoidable evil, but the treasure lies beyond. What an audience pays a ticket price for is airports and diesel fumes -  the music is free.

This summer as AKUS remains on recording sabbatical, I have the good fortune of traveling through the UK and Europe with Elvis Costello and the Sugarcanes. Elvis takes excellent care of his troops. We stay in the finest hotels and play in the best halls available. The Sugarcanes, if you are not acquainted with the band, are Stuart Duncan, Dennis Crouch, Mike Compton, Jim Lauderdale, Jeff Taylor, and me, making for a stage full and a joyful noise. One of the happiest times for me is when we finish and I see only smiling faces, an anomaly these days in professional music.

Robbie McLeod wrangles the band through airports and hotels and to sound check, then out of the building after the show back to the hotel or onto the bus, no stone unturned and no soldier left behind. Milo makes sure the tea is fresh and the gear makes it to the next gig, all while cracking the whip on the crew of good-natured guys and gals who create an environment that enables all this good cheer. This is a truly professional unit. They have been with Elvis for decades and take forth the good will of the boss, a prolific songwriter stricken with insomnia.

Which is most often put to good use by giving us a new song about every two days which we work up in sound check and often do that night in a surprise moment, a sudden change in the set list. This set list is what looks like any ordinary list of songs only they can go out of order if the audience starts to latch onto a particular groove of lyric or beat. The band flows effortlessly from section Z back to ground zero on the list by slight motions and quick intros, which become audibles all evening.

All of this started four days after my family and I returned from another glorious Telluride. Daughter Olivia was working the festival this year as we all enjoyed each other's company in the town that grows from 3500 to 15000 during each day of Bluegrass. I could go on for days about how fun playing in the trio with Omar and Viktor was. It is a thrill ride from end to the other; it does not get any better than that for my songs. Those two just took it all to a new level. We will be playing again at Hardly Strictly Fest in San Fran come October. This is an event for me. No doubt, the new record will have a few samples for everyone to hear.

Back to this tour....

As luck would have it, our first show was in London in Hyde Park for Hard Rock Calling, a 100,000 plus audience with our band, Crowded House, Crosby, Stills and Nash, and ending with Paul McCartney. Early on, I saw Abe Laboriel Jr. right after our show and he invited me up to see the McCartney show he would be playing drums on later. Elvis and I hit the stage left side just as they started to play. I have been a huge Beatles fan all my life and have met Paul and Ringo at Grammy functions, but never saw Paul do his show. For so many years, he would not do the Beatles material but there was plenty this day.   The band was glorious with Abe smashing the drums while singing high harmonies over Paul. All the while the side stage was filling up with McCartney girls and their kids, Bill Wyman, the Jonas Bros, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Little Steven standing behind me, trying to see over me made it all so crazy, I left on the next last song and made my way back across the park to find a bicycle taxi for a cool ride back to my hotel in the strange heat of the London evening. Still I could hear the crowds last strains as they sang Hey Jude with McCartney. My Beatles fix was intact, yet next day I happened to be going to Liverpool. Strange? I think not..