or the next week or so we’re at home enjoying a sort of calm before the storm.  Pretty soon we’ll be out on the road for quite a long time.  We just announced the dates for the second leg of the Young and Far From Home tour yesterday, and there will be more coming.  Check out the tour page on the site, and make your concert-going plans now.  Chances are… if you live in the continental United States, we’ll be playing a show pretty close to you at some point on this tour.  Speaking of the continental United States… we’ll soon be leaving them for a little while to do our first ever European tour.  I am uncontrollably excited about these shows.  Even if the only people we play to are a handful of German sausage vendors, I feel like it’s such a milestone for us to do a tour over there.  Going to Europe kinda makes me feel like I should do some research and find my family crest.  I bet it’s got something really awesome on it… like a gryphon!  Speaking of something really awesome… the run of shows we just finished reminded me of something.  We played shows opening for Train in front of thousands of people, and we even played to our biggest audience to date at a festival in front of 50,000 people.  But none of that compared to the two shows we played at the end of the run in Asheville and Tuscaloosa.  Those nights were amazing! There’s something absolutely electric about getting in front of our fans, a room full of people who are there because of our music.  Nothing compares to it.  We are overwhelmingly blessed to have people that connect with what we do in such a real way.  The calm before the storm is almost done.  We’ll see y’all very soon!

- Joe