"We're home...briefly," said Slaid Cleaves, an Austin, Texas-based singer/songwriter/guitarist who grew up in South Berwick, Maine.

"We've been doing these little weekend tours here in the Texas area for a couple of months now, but a week from today is the start of our five-month summer tour where we'll leave our home in Austin and won't see it again until November."

He'll be performing at Slates in Hallowell this coming Monday evening, June 29, and it was to support that gig that an interview was arranged.

Cleaves is currently promoting his brand new CD, "Everything You Love Will Be Taken Away...," which sports some liner notes by another famous Mainer, Stephen King.

"It's turned out to have the desired effect of getting me just a little bit more attention ... a little point of interest to make people want to write about it," Cleaves said.

Now, speaking of writing, it was observed that the singer/songwriter co-penned three of the 11 songs on the album with a gentleman called Rod Picott, who is also from Maine. How did he get teamed up with Picott to do some songwriting, anyway?

"Well, I met him on the school bus in third grade," Cleaves said. "And that started a long friendship -- music related. We had a garage band together in South Berwick in high school and he moved on to Nashville and I moved to Texas, but we get together a couple times a year."

One was curious to know if the singer/songwriter -- though he's been in Austin for quite a few years now -- ever found himself missing Maine at times.

"I was incredibly homesick the first couple of years in Texas, partly just for physical things like Pop's Clam Hut fish sandwiches and the smell of the ocean, the Old Port with Gritty McDuff's, the smell of them making beer in the Old Port," Cleaves said. "But also because I was able to support myself with music in Portland, which I was not able to do in Austin for several years. So between those two things, yeah, I was, many times, ready to move back to Maine. But it was my wife, Karen, who just loved it in Austin here."

Since being there, though, he's built up his own favorite things about his new home in Texas: New food, new friends and, of course, the music scene.

"My career has blossomed down here after several very lean years," Cleaves said. "It's now doing very well. And we can always tour up there (in Maine). We've always felt that Portland and Austin are the two coolest cities in the country. Yeah, it's pretty great having the best of both worlds."

Talk turned back to a comment made early on: The fact that they wouldn't be back home until November -- just how much of the country will he be taking in on this upcoming road trip?

"Well, we're gonna do a lotta Northeast stuff, obviously," Cleaves said. "A buncha Maine shows in the summer, but we're also flying out to Canada for a festival and then we're gonna do a whole West Coast tour in September and some Mid-West stuff, as well, and the U.K. in October. In fact, I think we actually fly into Texas for one weekend then fly back to Maine, get in our car and drive down the Eastern Seaboard on the way back home in November."

Wow. When he was back in South Berwick growing up, one bets he did not see this amount of traveling coming, correct?

"Well, as a teenager, I think part of the dream was traveling the world doing music for people," the singer/songwriter/guitarist said with a laugh. "I didn't realize how long it would take me to get to this level. I also didn't really realize how grueling it can be sometimes; but, sure, Rod and I always talked about rigging up our two Plymouth Dusters and tour the world in (them). We'd sure fantasize about it."

As the conversation wound down, it was asked how long his new CD had been out. Cleaves paused to do some quick mental calculations before declaring that it had been released in early April. Seeing it's only been available for a couple of months, one wondered if it was a fair question to ask how it was going over with his many fans.

"It's going great," Cleaves said. "It's having the desired effect of re-invigorating my career -- my last record of original material was five years ago, and I did a cover project in between...those were sort of maintenance records to kind of keep things moving along, but I was due for more of a break-through record that says, 'Hey, check this guy out, he's really got something good here!' I'm getting that nice response now."

Was there anything he wanted to have passed on to his fans in his birth state?

"Oh, no...I don't have an agenda except to let people know about the record," Cleaves said. "That's why I do this. I travel the world to let people know about my latest record, play some shows and make, hopefully, some connections."

Lucky Clark is a music journalist living in Sweden, Maine. He may be reached at lucky@megalink.net.