Blues artist Robert Cray [ tickets ], whose latest album arrives in stores later this month, will back the set with plenty of U.S. shows.

Following a Saturday night (5/14) performance in Missouri, Cray and his band will tackle four May stops in California, and four June stops on the East Coast. A lengthier round of U.S. shows kicks off in early August. The group's U.S. itinerary is included below.

The roadwork supports Cray's forthcoming album, "Twenty," which hits shelves May 24. He and his group--keyboardist Jim Pugh, bassist Karl Severaid and drummer Kevin Hayes--recorded the set late last year in Los Angeles with Grammy-winning engineer Don Smith (The Rolling Stones, Miles Davis); Cray and Pugh pulled double duty as the album's co-producers.

"What I like most about the album is the variety of songs," Cray said in a statement. "We covered a lot of bases on the record--from a touch of jazz with 'My Last Regret' and 'Two Steps From The End' to 'Does It Really Matter' which has a rock feel to it. We have a straight-up blues thing with 'It Doesn't Show' and the song 'Poor Johnny' even has an early reggae or ska kind of beat to it."

On the album's title track, Cray voices his opposition to war in Iraq.

"The song is about an innocent young guy, who, after the events of 9/11, wants to do his part for his country," Cray said. "He doesn’t know he's going to end up in Iraq, watching the horror that's going on there ... and he ends up losing his life. It's a subject that needs to be spoken about and is, in some ways, a continuation from one of the songs we did on the last album ['Distant Shores' from 2003's 'Time Will Tell']."

Earlier this year, Cray, Pugh, Severaid and Hayes celebrated their 1,000th performance together, according to a press release.