But YOUUUUUUUUU. Why you wanna give me a runaround? Is it a sure-fire way to speed things up, when all it does is slow me downnn. Oh, sorry. Just singing a little Blues Traveler. You know you love it too.

Now that we got that out of our system, you know they are coming to perform at The Concert Venue at Harrah’s Resort Atlantic City on May 24th, right?! And you know that the original members of the group, John Popper, Chan Kinchla and Brendan Hill, have been together for 25 years and formed in Princeton, NJ? You may even remember them from the NYC jam band days of the late ’80s/eary ’90s. Whatever the case, you certainly know that these dudes have been around for awhile and have been making real music. Music full of a little bit of jam band, a little bit of blues, a little bit of rock and a little bit of pop.

Bassist Tad Kinchla (brother of Chan) and keyboardist Ben Wilson entered the scene after original bassist’s Bobby Sheehan’s death in 1999 and have fit harmoniously with the rest ever since. We actually caught up with one of these “old newbies” yesterday to chat about the show, the band and more! Check it out, below.

TAC: You’re in the midst of a pretty big tour. How do you keep yourselves healthy, energized and ready to go these days on the road?

Ben Wilson: I think everybody sort of has a different strategy. John is a serious night owl, so he gets up about three hours before the show, showers up, does his warm ups and kind of likes his show to be a mid-morning workout or something like that. So every show is sort of a new thing. Chan, Tad and get up mid-morning, drink some coffee, chill out, afternoon gym run, then an afternoon nap. You know, pretty rough life out there on the road! And then we bring it on in to show time. But Chan’s knee has been bothering him so now he and Brendan have been kind of wrestling about playing X-Box in the back lounge of the bus! That’s how it works. It’s really just managing the down time. People have these ideas about being on the road, but you have a remarkable amount of free time. It’s not like free time when you’re at home and you have your car and can drive wherever you want and have all your little toys in your house. You’re sort of restricted to either the bus or the hotel or that sort of thing.

TAC: What’s been your favorite track to perform live lately and why?

Ben Wilson: I’m a big fan of “Recognize My Friend”. It’s very soulful in the way that we play it. It has a really cool guitar line that is kind of in harmony with the bass and it’s sort of hypnotic. It goes from small dynamically to big dynamically with John singing the lead and Tad, Brendan and I singing backup, so there’s a big chorus kind of effect. It has kind of a chugging repetitiveness that when you have that sort of repetitiveness, you can add little things in to add flavor and to add energy, and it kind of ends up in this big peak which is nice.

TAC: What can fans expect from your show here at Harrah’s Resort on 5/24?

Ben Wilson: Unbridled awesomeness! Because of the legacy of the band with a lot of hits in the ‘90s, we obviously want to touch on those. You hate it when you go see a band and you leave saying ‘Oh, they didn’t play this song or that song.’ We don’t want to be those guys. A lot of musicianship, great singing by John. I think he’s an under-appreciated singer and also his harmonica virtuosity. We’ve been trying to have a little more dynamic in the show where there’s one or two very quiet songs. John feels like that we’ve had so much of our career rocking out in a live setting, and we still want to do that, but he wants to have a little bit of representation of the softer side. For the ladies!

TAC: We dig that. You have a little break in your tour after your show here. Will you stick around and be celebrating some of your Memorial Day weekend with us?

Ben Wilson: I think I will be flying home to spend some of my Memorial Day weekend with my family. And then at the conclusion of Memorial Day weekend, we have to fly out to San Jose for a show out there, then we fly back to the east coast. It’s gonna start getting really busy here pretty quick.

TAC: Oh, wow. Not too much of a break then! You guys have released 6 albums since you joined the band. Is there one of these you are proud of the most or feel like you were able to deliver it the way you wanted as an artist without pressure from record label and industry execs?

Ben Wilson: After the first couple records when I was in the band, we didn’t have a ton of industry pressure so to speak. After Bridge, we got off of Interscope and that was where you would feel pressure because they spent so much money so they have a vested interest in getting some of it back, and so there was more heat on that deal. After that, it’s more of a question of we want you guys to feel satisfied as artists, but we also want to know that there’s something we can sort of push. Part of being Blues Traveler is the jammy/musicianship side, but then there’s also the poppy side. People expect a little of that on each record. There have been varying degrees of trying to live up to that. This last record, Suzie Cracks The Whip, feels like one where we kind of got back being able to meld the two sides of Blues Traveler in a way that felt very real and not in order to try to satisfy one side or the other.

TAC: We were just going to ask you about Suzie Cracks The Whip because that ranked the highest out of all Blues Traveler albums made in the last 10 years. What is it about this one that seemed to resonate so well?

Ben Wilson: I think that was one of the reasons. I think that also as a band, we’ve been writing material together for a lot of years and the original three guys for 25 years, and we turned a little bit to some outsiders to breathe some new life into our process and add ideas to the ways that songwriting can go. I think that it relieved some of the pressure. I don’t think that some of the songs were songs that we couldn’t come up with on our own musically, but I think when somebody brings something in and it’s a whole entity, you don’t feel the same pressure to meld it and change it. You don’t have to layer a bunch of extra stuff on it which we tend to do when one of the five of us brings material in on our own. So it’s a good learning process. And I think it was also the mixture of having Sam Hollander, our producer come in. He is a very pop-oriented guy, but really understood the heart and soul of Blues Traveler because he was around when Blues Traveler was coming up in the early days in New York City. He was kind of part of that scene with the whole jam band thing that was blowing up at the time.

TAC: Crystal Bowersox from American Idol also has vocals on this album. How did this collaboration come to be?

Ben Wilson: She is a big Blues Traveler fan and has been for a number of years apparently. After she had her run on Idol, her and John somehow connected and we need a female vocalist. John said he would call her and she just happened to be on her way to another mutual friend of ours’ studio in New Mexico to do some songwriting and recording. So, we sent him all the files and she was able to sing all the parts and send it on back in two days. We were just blown away. When Sam was doing the mixing, he was looking to use it in certain parts, but it just seemed to make the most sense to use it all the way through. The cool thing is that the song was written by Carrie Rodriguez who is obviously a woman, so it was nice to have that representation on that particular tune.

TAC: John & Tad are big on the twitter! Have they mentioned anything they’ve learned about your guys’ fans through social media and do you think you’ll ever get on there too?

Ben Wilson: I don’t know if I’ll be a twitter guy. I’m not sure how responsive Brendan, Chan and I are to the social media thing. I can’t say that we have anything to be particularly proud of in terms of our additions to that part of the Blues Traveler world or the Blues Traveler media empire! But, John is very active on twitter and he does occasionally come in and tell us this or that, or he feels the need to go on twitter to explain something. We’ve had a couple times where we were booked to do some shows and then way out in advance something comes up where we won’t be able to do them whether it’s our fault or the promoter’s fault.  He’s used twitter as a way to explain that which has been helpful. It’s a way of keeping people realizing that we’re alive and well.

TAC: What’s next for you guys?

TAC: That is unclear. We’ve been playing live for so long and that’s not going anywhere. We love doing that. John has been pursuing little side things. I’ve been pursuing side things. John and I together have been pursing side things. So let’s just see if we can keep Blues Traveler rolling and also investigate some of these opportunities that maybe in the past we haven’t been able to follow through on just because of wanting to do Blues Traveler. And also with the whole change in the music industry, are we gonna start just releasing a single every six months? Are we going to do another record? Are records dead? That whole thing. As a band with the time we’ve spent doing this career, what’s the best avenue for us? We signed a 2-record deal with 429 Records who released Suzie, so if they want us to do another record, I suppose that’s what we’ll do. It’s just a question of is that the best thing. Is it better to do a six-song EP? It’s weird! Most people now like that one song, so they don’t buy the CD anymore. Musicians, artists and also labels have a lot of complicity with that because for so long, they’ve made one good song and then throw a bunch of shit songs on there and people got burned spending $15 on a CD for one tune. It’s just hard to figure out where the whole thing is gonna land, but Blues Traveler’s not going anywhere, that’s for darn sure!

Woo! Ben Wilson has spoken, ya’ll! These guys are real  musicians, so you KNOW you’ll be in for a good show. Grab your tickets for Blues Traveler on May 24th at Harrah’s Resort here if you haven’t already. They hit the stage at 8 p.m.!