Chances are that catching up with singer-songwriter Todd Snider will come when he's on the road.

It was no different this time around, as Snider, who's spent the past decade earning the praises of such songwriting hall of famers as Billy Joe Shaver and Jerry Jeff Walker, was working his way west for a solo show tonight at the Belly Up Tavern in Solana Beach.

Snider has gained a loyal following based as much on his goofy stories about oddball acquaintances and wrong-place-wrong-time situations as for his quirky folk-shaded songs.

This phone interview found Snider in front of a McDonald's in Dallas en route to Austin at the beginning of a lengthy six-week trip to support his latest record, "The Devil You Know." Yet Snider insisted that this trip's a little out of the ordinary for him.

"I usually don't work this hard," insisted Snider, who had started the tour with a weekend of shows in the Bahamas. "I had to get a head start on my tan. I usually fly out on a Thursday and am back home on Monday. We're out for six weeks this time. We'll do another one like this in the beginning of summer. But I haven't been in San Diego for a while, so it's good to get back out there."

Yet, as Snider treks west, there's no band in tow. A bit surprising, considering that "The Devil You Know" has an unusually hard edge to it.

"It's just myself, my tour manager and my wife," Snider said. "We're putting some of my wife's artwork in the lobby of the theaters we're playing. She painted the cover."

Snider admits the new album's a bit of a departure. Changing it up wasn't part of the plan, he said, but it just turned out that way.

"It's kind of a rock record, isn't it?" he said with a little laugh. "I tried to write a sequel to 'East Nashville.' After a year, I realized it wasn't matching up as a sequel. I realized I can't do what I did. That'd be wimpy."

Snider was fooling around at home with his electric guitar -- something he rarely plays -- and while he compared his playing to throwing a rock through a window, he felt he was nonetheless playing rock music.

"I was trying to play like Keith Richards, but I'm not good enough to steal," he said. "It was a little sloppy."

The title track includes a Todd Snider rarity.

"When I wrote it, I included a little guitar lick," he said. "It seemed like I'd got out the whiskey and was 24 again."

Yet Snider doesn't try to tame the album's rock edge when playing solo.

"The songs translate pretty well," he said. "I tried them out and they sound good."

It took Snider a decade to finally turn "The Highland Street Incident" into a song. Snider had been mugged while on a break during a show in Memphis. He went to grab his cigarettes from his car when a couple of guys came up on him, whacked him with the butt of a pistol and stole what little money he had on him.

"I got two steps past them when I saw the gun," he said. "I chuckled and thought, 'Clearly they can see I don't have any money. So I ran."

It was a different kind of pain than writing about a breakup, or addiction, Snider said.

"It was painful to go through," said Snider. "My first instinct was to write something self-pitying. I had to let it gestate."

Not surprisingly, Snider said the mugging changed his life forever.

"The first 50 drafts I was having compassion for me," he said. "Then I turned it around. I had compassion for them. They were caught three days later. I could still pick them out of a lineup, and that was 15 years ago."

Snider also wrote about another confrontation -- this one with a bunch of frat boys who beat up his brother. Similarly, Snider turned it around and wrote it from their view and added another twist: What if one of the frat boys in the song was former Texas party legend and current president of the United States, George W. Bush?

"I had the story about the rugby players, who didn't really care who you were," he said. "They were into Jerry Jeff Walker, and were mostly based on not being in a frat."

But there was no hook, no trademark Todd Snider twist on a story. Until his wife reminded him of the impetus of the story. Snider and his brother had gone to a party by a lake near San Marcos, Texas, when a bunch of frat guys wanted to fight, picked out his brother and broke his jaw.

"She reminded me about the first time I saw Bush in the debates and that smirk he has," Snider said. "And how seeing him on TV had reminded me of the guys who attacked me and my brother."

Not that Snider was a saint as a kid.

"I had a semester in high school when I was inside that frat mentality," he said. "I spent a little time backstage with the bullies. By my junior year I was out of it, though. Still, when you look back, some kids have no choice. Maybe that's what happened to Bush. I don't know."