Tomorrow evening Jessie Farrell and the band will hop on an honest-to-God tour bus and drive through the Rockies to meet up with Brooks, Dunn, and Jackson -- who, according to what I just wrote, don't require first names.

The goal is to "support" them on their tour -- at least that's the term that's bandied about when talking about such things -- but, let's be honest: This is a terrific opportunity for Jessie to reach the audience that might have escaped the extensive radio play, music videos, and past tours with Emerson Drive, Shane Yellowbird, Aaron Pritchett, Johnny Reid, and a Jamaican holiday that happened to end up on CMT in the form of CMT On The Beach.

So, to summarize the things I'm excited about:

1. The bus.

The prospect of getting to travel in something larger than a Dodge Caravan (with Stow-n-Go seats, our saving grace) and not having to drive ourselves -- this is a major improvement. Stress levels will be lower, hours of sleep will be greater, guitar cases falling on top of people in the back seat will be neutralized -- all these things contribute to days and nights being way more rad.

2. Big shows

These will be our biggest shows to date in a number of ways: biggest audience, biggest venues, biggest stages, biggest sound systems, biggest number of people on our team (11 in our bus!). It won't be like this from now on, of course, but certainly good (and entirely necessary) experience for me as a musician and motivation to keep working towards playing with a certain calibre of artists in these types of contexts. Let's call it a carrot in front of a bass-playing donkey. Actually, in country music, a bass-playing donkey would probably have more gigs than me -- that's a really good shtick.

I could go on, but I really do have other stuff to do before tomorrow.

I'll make an effort to post from the road in one form or another.

Until then,

R.