But Cuddy's not complaining. With every negative--"I enjoy the playing, but I don't necessarily enjoy the life," he says at one point--comes several positives, like the good fortune of having a two-decade-long career as a songwriter and performer in a band that has outlasted countless rock acts that crashed and burned after one shot at the big time. "We're lucky we've had labels," says the t-shirt-and-sweats-clad Cuddy, fresh from the tour bus and reclining on a couch inside the Troubadour in West Hollywood. "Most bands don't have the opportunity to do that six times. We've had a lot of lives down here, and I guess we've been lucky."

Lucky yes, but it helps that Blue Rodeo is, for one, a treasure north of the border, and for two, critically acclaimed by the American rock press with every release, nearly without fail. ("The highest praise we've ever had in America is that we play American music well," says Cuddy.) Tremolo, the band's sixth record, and their first for the revamped Sire label, keeps the string alive. As usual, it features songs by both Cuddy and co-leader Greg Keelor--the sunny-sounding Cuddy being McCartney to Keelor's more introspective Lennon, if you will. As usual, songs are a typically graceful Blue Rodeo amalgamation of Beatle-poppy country-rock ("Moon & Trees," "Shed My Skin," "Fallen From Grace"), melancholy ballads ("Falling Down Blue," "Beautiful Blue") and the occasional push into the sonic unknown ("Frog's Lullaby," the punky "Graveyard").

For Tremolo, the band set up shop in a Toronto studio, rolled tape and ran through each song repeatedly, until an acceptable take was recorded. Less concerned with individual parts than the feel of the song as a whole, this was an entirely different recording process for the band and a direct reaction to the patience-testing diligence that went into Nowhere To Here, Tremolo's dark, sprawling and, in Cuddy's words, "tortured" predecessor. "This is what the band would do if we were sitting around on a Sunday afternoon and just playing some songs," he says of Tremolo.

			"Moon & Tree"
			"Shed My Skin"
			"Falling Down Blue"

Since then, Cuddy's been busy extracting inspiration and vitality from musical sources like a recent solo-acoustic gig by Squeeze man Glenn Tilbrook and discs like Wilco's Being There and Neil Young's Sleeps With Angels. Plus, there's also the sheer joy of playing live, especially in the States, where the otherwise lamented lack of fame translates into greater freedom to play whatever they please. "Unless," Cuddy says, "there's a bunch of Canadians in the crowd," who are prone to "wear Canadian shirts and scream at the Canadian references," and might demand the occasional Canadian hit. But that, too, is okay with Cuddy. Like he's gonna complain about having a few more people rooting them on in America.