Lifehouse drummer Rick Woolstenhulme Jr. knows it’s on. The group is about to embark on a four month tour to support its latest release “Smoke and Mirrors,” the band’s fifth album, which is scheduled to be released in early March.

If there’s one thing Woolstenhulme Jr. would like people to understand as Lifehouse hits the road it is seeing them live is worth the ticket price.

“Now days people want honesty. They don’t want any tricks. If want to see if someone can sing and play a song and they hear it on the radio they’re like wow, they love it, they want to go out and see that exact thing,” Woolstenhulme Jr. told Alternative Addiction. “They don’t want to see an attempt at trying to do that. You know what I mean?”

Lifehouse will be on tour with Chris Daughtry for the next couple of months. In fact, Daughtry joined the band for a guest vocal spot on one of the tracks on “Smoke and Mirrors,” a song called “Had Enough.”

“There is a four month tour with mid-March, before that point we’re setting up the record bouncing all over the place. We’ll be in n Europe, Mexico and the states. We’ll be in New York for the release of the album,” Woolstenhulme Jr. said. “Other than that the ball is starting to roll and we’re going to be hitting it really hard for the next few years. The goal is the put our heads down and focus and make all this work.”

Lifehouse has this touring thing down. Since they first hit it big in 2001, with the song, “Hanging by a Moment,” a song that won a Billboard Music Award for Hot 100 Single of the Year, they have prided themselves in delivering live and making their music translate from the studio to the stage.

“We take a lot of pride in being a band that actually does play. When we play shows, it’s four guys, four instruments coming out of the PA. There’s not electronic anything. It’s the real deal basically,” Woolstenhulme Jr. explained.  “On these last two records, as all of our record, we like being in the studio, and we like the pressure to record live as a band, and having the bar line high enough to where you’re actually cutting something that’s going to be kept the way it is.”

The new CD tries to be different without straying too far from the formula that has helped Lifehouse go from a group first formed under the name Bliss in 1999. Bliss put out a CD called “Diff's Lucky Day.” Bliss turned into Lifehouse and since the change has produced four top 40 hits over a 10-year stretch.

“He’s (Jason Wade, lead singer) been really great about not doing same thing over and over. As a song writer, it gets tricky. There’ a lot of pressure on his shoulders. He doesn’t want to stay in a box and is experimenting with many different ideas, from lyrics to arranging,” Woolstenhulme Jr. said. “There’s a track called ‘Nerve Damage’ which is kind of the heavy track on the record that’s cut live. We haven’t been following a format. Just kind of dive in and be creative and see if anything comes out of it. At the end of the day, I think his writing on this record is going to prove that he’s capable of many more things than what people are aware of.”

Nerve Damage represents how “Smoke and Mirrors,” will differ from their other albums. “We’ve taken on to be more sure there’s more uptempo rock tracks on the record because that’s where we’ve come from,” Woolstenhulme Jr. said. “On the new album “When we went into the studio, we wanted to hop in and keep the energy and vibe of the stage and shift it right over into a studio.”

With Lifehouse being on the road for so long there has been talk of the band releasing a live CD. It makes sense due to the fact that they pride themselves in having quality of their live shows.

“[Playing live] has kind of been our mainstay. A band like us had to put in the work on the road and really prove ourselves,” Woolstenhulme Jr. said. “You have to bring the show and play for small places when there’s not a lot of people coming out to the point where people start talking and start realizing, ‘wow this is a great live band.’ At the end of the day you can’t hide anything you’ve got to be honest and get down there an play that. I’m hoping we get to do a [live] dvd. I’m hoping we can do it at Red Rocks, that would be fun.”

Listen To Alternative Addiction's Interview with Lifehouse