For touring musicians, the road can be a complicated beast. Most of the time, it is exhilarating. Then at some point, it becomes exhausting.

Singer, songwriter and guitarist Stephen Kellogg knows this, and over the past year, he’s had to deal with both the good and the bad on some level.

Last spring, Kellogg was forced to face one of the road’s negatives when the subject of road burnout was brought up by members of his longtime band, The Sixers. Simultaneously, Kellogg adds, there was an overall feeling within the group that maybe it was time to do something else for a while.

After several years of exploring the country (and exploring various interests), Nebraska native Shannon Labrie decided to settle in the country music capital of the world to focus on a career in music.

Even though she’s based in Nashville, Tenn., Labrie isn’t aiming to become a country starlet. The singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist has settled into Nashville’s independent music scene, releasing her debut album, Just Be Honest, in early 2013. One of its standout tracks is the airy, dreamy “I Remember a Boy,” which sounds like what might have happened if a young Sarah McLachlan had worked with producer Daniel Lanois.

Earlier this week, Labrie called to talk about some significant personal and musical firsts in her life.

Like other veteran artists (among them Willie Nile, Marshall Crenshaw and Asleep at the Wheel), singer/songwriter Paula Cole recently turned to Kickstarter as a way to raise money for a music-related project — and was very successful.

Cole hoped to raise $50,000 last fall to offset what she called “the big, costly Ms” — mixing, mastering and manufacturing — for her sixth studio album, Raven. She reached her goal and then some, receiving more than $75,000 in pledges during the campaign’s 37-day window.

Raven was released April 23 on Cole’s own 675 Records, so that means she no longer has the benefit of a major label’s financial or marketing muscle like she did for her breakthrough, This Fire (released in 1996 on the Warner Bros. imprint Imago). That doesn’t seem to matter much to Cole, who is embracing both the freedom and the extra responsibility that go along with what she describes as “a smaller, humbler career.”

Around 2008, while searching for someone to produce one of his songs, Ryan Merchant turned to Craigslist, where he came across an ad from fellow singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Sebu Simonian.

“Apparently I was the first and only person who responded,” Merchant recalls. “I can’t remember exactly what [his ad] said, but it linked to a Web site with a video of Sebu performing a song with his old band. I was sold right away.”

At first, Merchant and Simonian worked together creating jingles. Now they’re making dance-pop music under the billing Capital Cities. The Los Angeles-based duo’s debut album, In a Tidal Wave of Mystery, is due June 7 via Capitol Records/Lazy Hooks. Among the album’s 12 songs are “Safe and Sound” (a recent Top 10 hit on Billboard’s Alternative Songs chart) and “Farrah Fawcett Hair” (featuring OutKast’s Andre 3000).

In the days leading up to Capital Cities’ first North American tour (which begins April 23 in Phoenix), Merchant checked in and talked about some other important firsts — music and otherwise — in his life and career.

The way Alpha Rev leader Casey McPherson looks at it, promotion for a recording artist can be a hit-or-miss process, similar to sowing seeds in a field.

“Some of them may grow, and some of them may not,” he explains. “It’s important to keep that simplicity to it. Because we’re not marketing people, but we do know how to connect with people with [our] music.”

In mid-March, singer/guitarist McPherson and two of his band mates did their best to connect with airline passengers at 30,000 feet. As part of a new Southwest Airlines promotion, they performed acoustic versions of the latest Alpha Rev single, “Sing Loud,” plus the Texas band’s signature “New Morning” during a flight from Los Angeles to Denver.

“The funny thing is, even some of the people working at Southwest didn’t know about this promotion," McPherson says. “We arrived at the airport at 6 a.m. in Austin, and we got home at 12:40 in the morning.”

On her 2005 album, Geronimo, Shannon McNally included her version of the Bobby Charles song “Tennessee Blues.”

Small Town Talk, McNally’s latest, is a start-to-finish tribute to the late songwriter who’s best known for composing such early rock ’n’ roll hits as “Walking to New Orleans” (a Fats Domino staple) and “But I Do” (covered by Clarence “Frogman” Henry).

But it wasn’t the famous songs by Charles that piqued McNally’s interest in his work and inspired her to make Small Town Talk. It was his self-titled 1972 album on the Bearsville label that featured contributions from Band bassist Rick Danko as well as John Simon, the group’s early producer.

“I was a huge Band fan, and this was just an incredible extension of The Band,” explains McNally, who discovered the album in 2000 and met Charles in 2002. “I love that production — how easy it was and tone-sensitive it was. It’s unpretentious. To me, it was intense chemistry and honest without working at it.”

A series of meditations, coupled with putting his thoughts down in longhand on legal pads, led Don Felder to write the bestselling book Heaven and Hell: My Life in The Eagles (1974-2001).

Those years of in-depth research and reflecting on personal and professional experiences — divorcing his wife of 29 years and leaving The Eagles, just to name two — also stirred up Felder’s other creative juices.

“I have a studio in my home,” the guitarist says, “so the whole time I would come across these emotions and feelings, I would go into the studio and write these song ideas. So it was kind of a dual cathartic path: One path was writing it in text for my book, and at the same time, my greatest emotional release is through writing and playing music.”

To date, Mansions on the Moon has been associated with some notable names, despite not having a full-length album under its collective belt. The Los Angeles band has opened arena dates for Wiz Khalifa, handled the official remix for Foster the People’s “Life on the Nickel” and captured the ear of Pharrell Williams, the executive producer of MOTM’s 2012 EP, Lightyears.

As for the in-progress Mansions on the Moon debut album, guitarist Ted Wendler will only share so much about it publicly.

“I can say that we don’t have a label at this point,” Wendler says. “We do have some hopeful things in the works. It’s been very awesome to be able to have complete creative control up to this point, and we do like that.

“We have probably 60 songs started that we feel are great,” he adds. “The real challenge is finishing them. But we finally have about five or six that I would be happy to release right now.”

As for the album’s release, the band is targeting 2013, “but it would be great to get it out this summer,” Wendler says.

Meanwhile, Mansions on the Moon will be on the road this spring — and playing a lot of new material, according to Wendler, who recently discussed some music-related firsts in his life.

For every Arcade Fire, there are so many other rock and pop acts from Canada (Sam Roberts Band and The Arkells immediately come to mind) that haven’t made a huge dent in the United States.

This comes as no surprise to singer/songwriter Tim Chaisson, who hails from Prince Edward Island, which is near Nova Scotia.

“I’m not quite sure why [that is],” Chaisson says. “I think that sometimes Canadian bands are really regionalized. A lot of them write lyrics that are very Canadian, and they reference Canadian places and things.”

Citing “an intimidation factor of crossing the border,” Chaisson says he hasn’t really tried to drum up stateside support via gigs or promotional appearances, focusing most of his energy on his home country. And as far as his albums, those haven’t been marketed to U.S. audiences — until now.

Several years have passed between Kevin Bowe albums, and being reminded of this prompts a chuckle from the singer, songwriter, guitarist and producer.

It’s a comfortable-sounding laugh, as if Bowe knows that fact is going to come up sooner or later when talking about his latest effort, Natchez Trace, which is credited to him and the Okemah Prophets, his two-piece band.

In trying to explain why it took him so long, Bowe doesn’t blame writer’s block or Chinese Democracy-style drama.

“No Axl Rose for me,” Bowe says. “I’m from Minnesota. We’re meat-and-potatoes people with work ethics. I just didn’t have time to do my own record.”

He adds, “It just kind of got away from me, I think, because I do a lot of different things for a living in music. So it’s easy to get really busy.”

With a storied past, a very active present and plans for the future, Zombies leaders Colin Blunstone and Rod Argent will have a lot of ground to cover during their SXSW interview that takes place a day before their official showcase performance.

Blunstone delved into some key areas of his British band’s history recently for Medleyville.us.

To label Patrick Krief’s Hundred Thousand Pieces a midlife-crisis album might be an overstatement, but lyrically, it does deal with some anxieties that Krief says reached a peak when he hit age 30.

Finishing the album, due March 19 through Rock Ridge Music, was a reminder to the Montreal-based Krief that music is what he does — whether it be as a solo artist, scoring films or as the longtime guitarist for The Dears.

Traveling often, according to singer/songwriter Carsie Blanton, “is a great way to take in new information. … It’s the best way for me to continue to get inspired about people.”

Blanton’s travels have taken her around the United States and Europe. Now based in New Orleans, the hard-to-classify solo artist who has unique experiences and strong opinions to share will be making the journey to Austin, Texas, for the 27th edition of South by Southwest.

When singer Sena Ehrhardt decided to launch a solo career, she only had to look to her then-band — and her family — for a steady collaborator: guitarist Edward Ehrhardt, her father.

Considering that she got her start in the Minnesota-area blues band Plan B, going solo and taking another member (parent notwithstanding) could have easily rubbed the group’s remaining musicians the wrong way. Ehrhardt says that wasn’t the case.