Travis Wrapping Up Stateside Winnebago Tour

When Travis' Fran Healy and Andy Dunlop planned out their fall stateside tour of a small, intimate dates, they hoped to rent a Winnebago and write a host of new material on their six-week trek. But things so far haven't gone to plan. "How has that worked out?" frontman Healy laughs when Spinner brings up the songwriting plan. "It's not worked out at all actually.

The one cut the tour, which wraps up later this week with a multi-night stint at New York City's Joe's Pub, has produced was done in an experimental fashion. "Do you know the game you play [with] paper and you draw the head and you fold it over and then the next person draws the body, fold it over and the next person draws the belly ... and at the end of the game you open it out and you have a freak drawing of some kind of creature? The way we wrote this song was... you're basically playing to the last thing that was recorded," Healy explains of the new cut he originally characterized on his band blog as "s---," but upon further review has decided was actually OK.

While the songwriting experiment wasn't a resounding success, the actual trek has been pure joy for the two members of Travis and the two crew members on the tour bus the men ended up renting after the practicality of having to drive a Winnebago across America set in.

"It's actually proved to be one of the more successful tours Travis have ever done because it's a lot simpler and smaller and focused," Healy says. "[That's] not to say when we do a full band it's not focused, but what I heard from people who have come to the shows is that they can actually focus more on the song. This has been kind of a dream come true for all concerned."

And for those who've been to the shows or plan to see one this week, the dates have been a bit like a Travis version of VH1's 'Storytellers.' "It's almost like your school teacher has given you an assignment to do over the weekend and you're presenting it to the class on Monday," Healy says of the setup. "We have a little projector and a projection screen to give some background to the songs and the songs are done in a chronological order to sort of give people an idea of when they were written. It's quite lighthearted and it's good fun."

The Scotsman will head back to his home base of Berlin, where he lives with his family over the holidays and get back into the writing he had hoped to do on the US dates. Once there, he'll head to a room in his home where a little visitor sometimes comes in to see what's going on -- his son Clay.

"He comes and plays the piano and plays the drums and plays the guitar and makes lots of noise and it's great, but I don't force anything on him," Healy says of his little one with partner Nora Kryst. "We're very hands-off with him, just kind of let him do whatever he wants, let him have as much fun as he possibly can because I think the whole playing part of being a kid is the bit where you learn most, so we just let him play."