Travis Talks New Album

May 25 -- After selling more than 3 million copies of 1999's The Man Who, Glasgow, Scotland's Travis has completed its third full-length and the band is awaiting its June 12th release.

"Right now we're trying to get distance from the record," bassist Dougie Payne says. "The process of recording is so involving. It's just the five of us [including producer Nigel Goodrich] in a crazy little bubble where we existed and nobody else did. We're slowly but surely extricating ourselves. At the moment we're familiarizing ourselves with the record as a record as opposed to what we've just been doing."

The process of leaving the bubble includes dealing with Herculean amounts of press interviews and TV appearances, including taping an appearance on U.K. television program Top of the Pops.

"Time is tight, I'll tell you that," says bassist Dougie Payne. "We were back in Glasgow the other day for six hours of interviews. We got a chance to go for a walk for half an hour. Glasgow is just beautiful, and I felt a bit homesick. I kind of wanted to go back up and just check out the scene and go to the clubs and all the bars that we used to go through.

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"In every campaign, there's milestones, and one of them is the first time you have to mime your music," he adds of the recent television appearance where they were asked to lip-synch. "It's funny. It's nice for a band to play music."

The 12-track album, titled The Invisible Band, took seven weeks to record in a Los Angeles studio, spread over a period of six months. At the helm was Goodrich, who produced The Man Who and also Radiohead's OK Computer and Kid A.

"We barely even talked about the record before we started recording," Payne says. "The only thing I remember Nigel saying at the bar the night before we started recording was, 'Let's get creative.' That's just the Travis way — things are completely accidental. Nigel sort of maneuvers you into a position in the studio where things happen by accident and you get all these serendipitous things that just work.