Adam Holloway of The Daily Campus recently spoke with singer-songwriter Randy Rogers of the Randy Rogers Band about life on the road, the band’s upcoming album and his upcoming acoustic shows. For interested fans, Rogers will be playing an acoustic show tomorrow night, along with Chris Knight and Billy Joe Shaver, at the Granada Theater on lower Greenville Avenue.

Adam Holloway: How have things been on the road? Have things been going well?

Randy Rogers: Yeah, man, couldn’t be better. Just lots of work and lots of highway miles. We just got finished with a tour of the Southeast with lots of SEC (Southeastern Conference) towns, SEC schools. We just got back from that and we got another little route up to the Midwest we’re going up to like Wisconsin and Indianapolis and Michigan and some other stops.

AH: Do you enjoy doing those Midwest runs or going up to places like Wisconsin and Michigan? What’s that like?

RR: We’re playing music for everybody…That’s the whole reason that I got into music, was for playing music for as many people as I could…it does mean a lot to me because it means that we’re expanding our business, which is the whole goal.

AH: Considering you’ve been on the road so much over the past few months, how has that impacted your songwriting and creating new material for a follow-up to “Just a Matter of Time”? (The band’s most recent release in 2006.)

RR: Well I’ve been writing more this time. We’re gonna make another record in January…I’ve been more disciplined with my writing than I ever have been and this time around we’ve got about 30, 32, 33 songs so far right now for the new record…We’re recording in Lafayette, La., and Radney Foster’s gonna produce again. Nothing has changed, except the songs of course.

AH: I know you really don’t have much downtime, but how do you spend your time with the downtime you do have, during your travel time? What do you guys do to keep busy?

RR: Well, we play golf a lot on the road. Everybody’s got their golf clubs on the road, so we try to make time for that…When the season is around, we’re all into baseball or football or any kind of sports stuff, so we try to, if we’re in some crazy town that has a pro sports team, we try to sneak off and hit a game, you know?

AH: You have several acoustic show dates with Billy Joe Shaver and Chris Knight next week, including one at the Granada. How do those acoustic in-the-round shows get organized?

RR: You know, I wanted to do some acoustic shows over the holidays, seems like I try to do that every year. You know, we started talking about who you want on, on these shows, and I’m a such huge fan of Billy Joe Shaver and have been for so long, so that was a dream come true for me when he decided that he was gonna do it, and then I’ve always been a huge fan of Chris Knight, so we reached out to Chris Knight to be a part of that as well.

AH: You’re obviously no stranger to big crowds, but a show like the one three weeks ago here in Dallas at Smirnoff [Music Centre] with Pat Green and Willie Nelson…How does that kind of venue compare to a venue like the Granada, for example, that houses only a few hundred?

RR: Yeah, I mean, I like playing all kinds of venues. The thing about playing those big venues, you know, is you can’t really see past that first three or four rows anyway, because the lights are so bright. So only when the people scream and yell can you really tell that there’s that many people out there. I love playing the acoustic stripped-down songwriter’s showcase just as much as I like playing anything…I’ve always wanted to be a songwriter and I’ve always wanted to tell stories and being able to play in a small venue like that gives me that opportunity.

AH: Speaking of the Smirnoff show, what was it like singing on stage with Willie Nelson?

RR: A dream come true. I was so excited, I’m still excited about it…It was just a real dream come true.

AH: You mentioned earlier that you have 30-something songs already written. How are you going to prioritize that to get it down to the number you need to release a new album?

RR: Everybody always asks me a question about like, “Well, who picks what songs go on the album?” And I swear to you, the truth is that the songs really pick themselves. I mean, you can tell if some song is stronger than the other songs…Usually it’s not a hard decision. I mean, there are certain songs you might fall in love with that other people might not get or fall in love with, or whatever, but for the most part, pretty much everybody [in the band] agrees without too much fuss or fighting.