By Craig Horleman

SELBYVILLE — After COVID-19 forced the band to suspend touring, chart-topping Train is back on track and on the road again.

They pull into the Freeman Arts Pavilion in Selbyville on Saturday and Sunday evenings. Although Saturday’s show is sold-out, there are tickets available for Sunday’s.

Lead singer Pat Monahan, the only original member still with Train, said the band is ready to rock again.

“It’s been a weird almost two years, but we’ve had a couple of live performances already, and the energy and the vibe is so kind of like spiritually uplifting that I wouldn’t say that it’s been worth being off the road for two years, but it’s definitely the feeling that you would hope for after all this time,” he said last week by phone.

The multi-Grammy and Billboard award-winning band from San Francisco has had 14 songs on Billboard’s Hot 100 list since the release of its debut self-titled album in 1998, which featured its first hit, “Meet Virginia.”

Band members are on the road currently to celebrate the 20th anniversary of their album, “Drops of Jupiter,” which broke Train to multi-platinum status thanks to the double Grammy Award-winning title song that spent 10 months in the Top 40. The tune has been certified six times platinum in the U.S. and earned the 2001 Grammy Award for Best Rock Song.

The group won another Grammy Award in 2011 for its hit, “Hey, Soul Sister,” from its multi-platinum album, “Save Me, San Francisco.”

“Hey, Soul Sister” was a No. 1 bestselling smash and the most downloaded single of 2010, achieving the Recording Industry Association of America’s diamond status, one of just 58 songs in history to do so.

After many months being off the road, Mr. Monahan said there was an unknown factor to it all.

“The only reluctant part of it has been like, ‘Is anybody going to want to come out?’ And the answer is yes, and that’s the fun part. We’ve done a year’s worth of Zoom concerts, and let me tell you, they’re not nearly as fun as when you can be in front of people and see their faces,” he said.

“It’s been a wild ride, and now, hopefully, things will just keep looking up and up and up, and then, we can get back to real normalcy, but it’s still not normal.”

He still remembers the last shows before the shutdown.

“The last we were out on the road was January of (2020). We did a cruise. We had a show in Aspen. We did Mardi Gras, and then, everything shut down,” he said.

“So we started writing songs, and we’ll have a new record this fall. But I was worried that my guys would get stuck somewhere, so I had to send everybody home, and then, we started writing songs over Zoom, and that was incredibly uninspiring for the first six months. And then, as I stopped feeling sorry for myself, I started to understand that maybe some good can come of it. So I think we’ve written some really good stuff.”

Mr. Monahan said the band will do a full-scale tour in support of that forthcoming album next year, but for now, he’s looking forward to these summer shows.

“There are 23 shows that we have booked for the summer. We didn’t want to overdo it, not knowing what the real state of the world would be. But I think it will be a good time, and I think it will be well-attended, and people will be excited to be a part of live music again. I’m trying to get my golf game in shape, so I can take some money from some friends of mine around the country,” said the singer, who is one of the better golfers who doubles as an entertainer. He added that he still struggles “with this hideous game that we all become addicted to.”

Expect this weekend’s slate of shows at the Freeman to be heavy on songs off the “Drops of Jupiter” album, given that it’s the record’s 20th anniversary.

Mr. Monahan said it doesn’t seem that two decades have passed since the band released that career-defining album.

“It’s funny that it doesn’t really (seem like 20 years), but my son, who’s 9 years old, he heard me talking about ‘Drops of Jupiter’ being 20 years old, and he was like, ‘Wait a minute, what? Twenty years?’ That’s 11 more years than he’s been around, so it doesn’t really feel like it’s been 20 years in some ways, and then, in other ways, it does feel like a long, long time ago,” he said.

The title track came to Mr. Monahan in a dream following the death of his mother. The record company was looking for one more song, and he hurriedly dashed off a demo recording of “Drops of Jupiter.”

To his surprise, the label loved it.

But that’s par for the course, Mr. Monahan said, as he often can’t tell if a song is going to be a hit.

“Any hit we’ve ever had, all of them surprise me. ‘Meet Virginia’ was a weird, little, quirky song. ‘Drops of Jupiter’ was a four-minute song, like an Elton John ballad with strings. ‘Hey, Soul Sister’ had a ukulele, and ‘Marry Me’ was just a vocal and acoustic guitar, and then, ‘Fifty Ways to Say Goodbye’ had like a mariachi band. It’s all weird, man. They all surprise me,” he said.

Despite doing many solo projects, including a rerecording of the Dirty Heads’ 2017 hit, “Vacation,” earlier this summer, Mr. Monahan said he likes coming back to the warmth of the band.

“It’s still a lot of fun for me. At this point, the guys in Train are my very close friends, and they’re ultra-talented, and as we talk about life being short, you just surround yourself with the right people after a certain amount of time together. If you don’t, you’ll just be unhappy, and that’s never the goal,” he said.

Train’s 7 p.m. shows will also feature the band Vertical Horizon. To purchase tickets for Sunday’s show, visit here.