The Scottish folk-rock band Travis [ tickets ] had an important revelation during the making of its latest album., "The Boy With No Name," its fifth collection of bittersweet pop songs.

"It made us realize we're not a jamming band like, say, U2 are, where they jam around for hours and hours and carve a song out of a big block of music," bassist Dougie Payne said during a telephone interview with LiveDaily from Monterrey, Mexico. "We are a songwriting band. It was a pretty important and crucial realization in the making of the album. We realized that we had to go away and write songs. Then that's what we did."

The band chose to forgo the three-day sessions it created with uber-producer Brian Eno, and retreated to New York and London to write songs. Mike Hedges and Nigel Godrich eventually produced the final album.

"We decided to go away and live, have a life, spend time with families and friends and read books and go to the movies--do all the stuff you need to do to fill yourself up," Payne said. "Oh, and write, as well. We did about three months of that. Then we went in the studio and recorded for a couple of weeks. Then we went away again and just did that process again and again. That's why the record took so long to make. We were doing that for two years from November 2004 until the end of 2006."

Perhaps the easiest task was naming the album. The title "The Boy With No Name" came from an e-mail that lead singer Fran Healy wrote soon after the birth of his son.

"Franny and his wife had a wee boy, who is now called Clay. For the first couple of weeks Clay was around, they couldn't decide what to call him. So he sent an e-mail and a photograph of Clay to friends and the title of the e-mail was 'the boy with no name,'" Payne said.

"Months, months later, he was looking for other e-mails, something to do with photo shoots or something, and this title popped out at him and he said, 'That's a good title.' We were at the point of looking for a name for the record. We stuck it on and it seemed to fit. It goes along with the Travis anonymous kind of aesthetic that we have--'The Man Who,' 'The Invisible Band' and 'The Boy with No Name.' It's kind of like the third part of that trilogy."

Travis is taking that trilogy on the road, playing the West Coast through Nov. 26. The band, which expects to have a new album out in early 2008, is one of the few European bands that have continually tried to expand their audience in the States.

"It's one of those things where you get to a certain level in Europe, or even just in Britain, and they expect it to happen that quickly and to that level in America--very, very speedily," Payne said. "It's not like that. You've got to keep coming back and back. The fact is that even if we can never get to the status that we're looking at in Europe and Great Britain, it doesn't really matter because we have good tours of the States and we sell tickets. We have great shows and we have a fantastic audience who comes to see us. If we cross over and get massive success, so be it. If we don't, then we still enjoy the shows."