Mike PalmTHE TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Pat Monahan, lead singer for Grammy-winning pop rock band Train, is on the road this summer with REO Speedwagon and Yacht Rock Revue.
The tour has taken the Pacific Northwest resident, back to his native Pennsylvania in July and is now visiting California where he moved when he was 19 and later helped form the band Train in San Francisco in 1993.
Known for songs like “Hey, Soul Sister,” “Drops of Jupiter” and “Drive By,” Train has been going steady for more than 30 years, with three Grammys and one song with more than a billion streams on Spotify.
“I feel like I never knew if I would make a big impact in music, but I always thought that I would last a while,” Monahan said. “I’ve always been a runner, but I’m not a sprinter, but I can run distance. And I just thought my life is very parallel to that.”
When it comes to his songwriting, Monahan said he feels like he does a better job of expressing himself than when he first started, but he added a caveat.
“Sometimes I do, but songwriting is like golf. You’ll go out and you’ll be so good and then you’ll have 12 (crappy) rounds of golf, and you’re like, ‘What happened?’ ” he said. “And so that’s songwriting. Once in a while, you’ll just be like, man, it all worked. And most times it doesn’t. Songwriting, I would say one out of 10 things that I work on is really worth listening to, but you have to just work through it to get to it.”
In support of this tour, Train released a new single, “Long Yellow Dress,” in April.
“It was a song about a dream I had and trying to locate a woman wearing a yellow dress that I could never get to, so it became a song that sounds like a pretty fun summer song,” he said. “… I’m hoping that we’ll see a whole bunch of long yellow dresses this summer.”
The track isn’t slated to be on an album, but Monahan said he’ll be heading to Nashville after this tour to finish off an album, with a possible fall or winter completion.
In the meantime fans have a new release to listen to. In April, Train played London’s Royal Albert Hall and the concert was recorded both for a streaming video and for a live album, both of which were released July 26, titleed “Live at Royal Albert Hall.”
“The live album was important because of the venue. We were just in the U.K. and Europe and got to play Royal Albert Hall in London, and that is such an iconic venue that we decided that is where the live album should take place,” he said. “I’ve watched it and listened to it, and it’s really something else, man.
This place is so cool. It sounds amazing. The crowd was incredible. Just this venue, itself, is worth the watch.”
Train is also celebrating the 15th anniversary of their 2009 album, “Save Me, San Francisco,” which featured “Hey, Soul Sister.”
“It’s a really strange thing,” Monahan said of why that song is so enduring. “If it becomes part of the fabric of society, I think it just can outlast a lot of things, whether it’s just the words, ‘Hey soul sister’ or whatever the relatable part of it is, it just keeps relating to younger people because young people rule the music world and always have.”
Train, & REO Speedwagon: Summer Road Trip 2024
When: 6:25 p.m. Sept. 10
Where: North Island Credit Union Amphitheatre, 2050 Entertainment Circle, Chula Vista
Tickets: $35 to $235
Online: concerts.livenation.com