Bluegrass-soaked jam band Railroad Earth [ tickets ] will continue to support its latest album, "Amen Corner," as it heads into 2009.

The sextet will ring in the New Year with a three-night stand in Portland, OR, and then play around the East Coast throughout January. Dates include a four-show run across New York, and stretch into late March, when Railroad Earth has a gig booked in Chicago. Details are listed below.

The improvisational-minded group--known for mixing acoustic roots music with everything from Celtic to jazz, country, folk and rock--is supporting its fourth studio set, which surfaced in June and debuted in the Top 40 on Billboard's Top Independent Albums chart. "Amen Corner" was recorded at singer/songwriter Todd Sheaffer's 300-year-old farmhouse in the rural New Jersey countryside, and he said the experience was a dream.

"Normally, you come home after six weeks on the road and jump into the studio, all frazzled because you don't have much left in the tank," Sheaffer explained in the band's bio. "This time, I feel like we've invited our friends into our living room and that's basically how we recorded it. We wanted for years to try working this way and I'm so happy we were finally able to do it."

The laid-back spirit of the album also has to do with the fact that half the band members became fathers during the year leading up to the recording process.

"The changes in our lives brought about a peacefulness that is reflected in the music," Sheaffer added. "We consciously tried to take the approach of 'less is more' in how we arranged the songs."

They met their goal with help from the band's longtime engineer, Mike Partridge, and Grammy Award-winning engineer/mixer Phil Nicolo. Several songs from "Amen Corner" are streaming at Railroad Earth's MySpace page.

The new record follows the double live CD "Elko," which was recorded during the group's spring 2005 tour. Both albums were released on SCI Fidelity, which is the String Cheese Incident's label.