All part of the magic

Rhonda Vincent is relentless.

By the year’s end the bluegrass superstar singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist will have been on the road for 250 days nearly without pause.

On Monday Vincent was “somewhere in Nebraska” headed West on tour with her band, The Rage, aboard the Martha White-sponsored tour cruiser. It’s not like piling into a tight van with a bunch of sweaty dudes. The Martha White Bluegrass Express comes equipped with satellite TV, TiVo, granite floors, marble showers, Internet and a kitchen.

“For lunch we had homegrown tomatoes, fresh mozzarella and warmed-up ribs,” Vincent said during a telephone interview. “We’re not exactly suffering.”

It’s a good life by Vincent’s standards when she doesn’t know exactly where she is.

“This is like being home for us. We love to travel. I have no idea where I am right now. We walk out of the bus in a different city everyday,” Vincent said. “That’s part of the magic.”

When she’s not onstage making heads spin with her masterful mandolin work (along with fiddle and guitar), Vincent spends her downtime on the express doing paperwork, crafting songs for her next album and connecting with fans by posting entries on her Web site’s tour journal, Join The Journey (http://nemr.net/~rhondav).

“We have very active message boards,” she said.

When the tour is finished, Vincent expects to have a new batch of songs ready for the studio she renovated to record this year’s scorching set, “Good Thing Going.”

Her seventh album on the venerable Rounder Records, “Good Thing Going,” shot to the top of Billboard’s bluegrass charts, thanks partially to the featured duet with Keith Urban.

“Good Thing Going” shows Vincent’s precision as a songwriter (five new original compositions) and bandleader; she knows when to replace a live drum kit with a medium-sized pizza box.

“The pizza box and brushes are still in the studio. That’s the thing about recording, there are no rules. On the Christmas album we used two brooms for percussion,” said Vincent, who the International Bluegrass Music Association has named “Female Vocalist of the Year” for seven years in a row.

While Vincent has made excursions to the more commercial country realm, she is unabashedly bluegrass.

“Bluegrass is not mainstream music. It has gone through cycles of popularity that, to me, haven’t done well for the image. We’re not in overalls, bare feet, playing the jug like in ‘O Brother Where Art Thou,’ ” Vincent said. “But when that happens it seems to cause a swell in the popularity. One of the things people love about bluegrass is its authenticity.”

Rhonda Vincent and The Rage appears tonight at 7 p.m. at The Bing Crosby Theater, 901 W. Sprague Ave. Tickets are $29 through TicketsWest, www.ticketswest.com, (509) 325-SEAT.