Cary Brothers and Ingrid Michaelson hit Phoenix on the Hotel Cafe Tour

Rachael Yamagata, who played several dates on the first Hotel Café Tour and went the distance with Brothers on the second, laughs at the memories she can actually conjure, though the dearth of detail says a lot more about those crazy nights than she can. "It truly is just like summer camp," she agrees. "Waking up in your underwear, Sharpie-ing people in the middle of the night, then having morning coffee with 12 laptops going."

Brothers laughs loudly when pressed for his own revelations about those late-night shenanigans and the stories of hard-partying that Michaelson says she's sworn to secrecy about. "What happens on the tour bus stays on the tour bus," he intones. Then, "When you're on a road trip across the country and your bed is 50 feet from the bar, you're having a good time. It's just that simple."

Radin scoffs at the suggestion that the bar is 50 feet from anybody's bed, though. "The bus is the bar." Still, he insists he wasn't so wild in past years, and it can't be nearly as wild as the mythology within the community claims; that's because, he points out, it can't just be the gig, then drinking and partying afterwards. "It's getting up at 7 a.m. and playing the early-morning TV show in that town, then going to a radio station and playing there, then going to do interviews, then soundcheck," he says. By the end of the day, sometimes you've done five shows. You're exhausted."

The Hotel Café Tour itself, at least if those who call the Hollywood venue their home have their way, will continue in perpetuity, growing as those who helped build it hopefully find more success. Brothers envisions the movement taking on a life of its own, even beyond him, so that the Hotel Café Tour's name alone begins to mean something to audiences.

"Branding is such a corporate-sounding word," he says. "It sounds like the antithesis of what we're doing, but it's the one thing that really describes what I want to do with this, which is, have these shows be about a night of music itself as much as any individual."

It's a novel idea, and one he looks to be pulling off.