Blues Traveler's summer trek continues Friday (7/18) in Minneapolis and makes its way to the East Coast and the Mountain states though late August. The band also has Texas's Austin City Limits Festival on the calendar in September, as well as an October gig in Richmond, British Columbia. The full itinerary is listed below.

"North Hollywood Shootout," produced by Grammy-winner David Bianco (Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers, Ozzy Osbourne), is scheduled to be released Aug. 26 on the Verve Forecast label. Blues Traveler made it a point to try and capture its spontaneous, jam-band spirit on the new record.

"On the last few records, we concentrated so much on the crafting of the songwriting and arrangements that we started losing some of the live spontaneity that the five of us created onstage," guitarist Chan Kinchla explained in a statement. "So on this album, instead of doing the usual pre-production process, where we really worked out the songs before taking them into the studio, we decided to go straight into the studio and do songwriting there. We recorded all the parts as we were working them out, and then built the songs from there."

The record throws fans a curveball with the closing track, "Free Willis, Ruminations from Behind Uncle Bob's Machine Shop," which features actor Bruce Willis, a longtime friend and BT fan. The six-minute spoken-word piece finds the quintet jamming over an insistent drum beat while Willis delivers a free-form monologue/rant.

"North Hollywood Shootout" follows last year's "Cover Yourself," a mostly acoustic affair featuring new takes on old Blues Traveler songs. The Grammy-winning group's last set of original material was 2005's "Bastardos!"