When I first came on the road with AMB I began to notice a trend almost immediately. The band travels mostly by car. I say car but what I mean to say is 15 passenger van and big diesel truck pulling a 24′ trailer. We break up into vehicles and share driving duties. Bill, Alex, and Robin mostly share truck driving duties, while Mario (bass player extraordinaire), Annie, and I share van driving duties. Sometimes we mix it up a little, Robin will drive the van, or Ben will take his turn, but mostly the schedule is pretty well set. I drive from 4 am until about 8 am, Annie picks up until Lunch, Mario drives the next 2 hours, then I drive the rest of the day and through the night until we roll into our hotel at about 2 am. They tell me it works out evenly that way.

But I digress. What I’ve found is that most people find a few things in their lives that bring them comfort each day, whether it is sitting down with the Bible in your favorite chair, or watching Fox News, or stroking your pet dog. But on the road, constancy like this can be a difficult thing to attain. What I began to notice was that the AMB had found two places of constant refuge throughout the United States.

I realized quickly that these two places have become their “homes away from home,” destinations they look towards eagerly, longingly, on our lengthy excursions. All of this was foreign to a Yankee like myself, who’s used to Dunkin’ Donuts and IHOP (that’s international fare), though I do admit, the fire burning at the Cracker Barrel is often a welcome sight. I firmly believe that if the Annie Moses Band were to stop frequenting the Cracker Barrel, multiple locations in multiple states would quickly find themselves bereft of business and stocks would plummet.

So it is that we stop, sometimes 6 or 7 times a day, at these two businesses, warming ourselves by the fire, filling our bellies with southern cuisine, treating ourselves to iced teas and frozen coffee drinks while stretched out over comfortably hip furnishings, checking our email. Here we find refuge from the confined capacities of our vehicles. If you frequent these places, we may just run into each other one day. If we do, I’ll have a tall medium roast, black.