Every band has a tour it doesn't see coming. The summer of 2006 started as a victory lap for Earth to America — the Compass Point record that turned out to be George McConnell's only studio album with Panic — and ended as a goodbye. McConnell played his last show on July 30 at the Fox Theatre in St. Louis; the band announced his departure two days later. The final two weeks, out to the August 13 close in Chicago, were covered by old friends John Keane and Sam Holt on guitar — a tour that finished with no permanent lead player, and you'd hardly know it from the tapes.

The new record did the early driving; "From The Cradle" was the most-played song of the run at thirteen. But the deep end is where this one lives. The band leaned hard into Pink Floyd — "Astronomy Domine" and "Interstellar Overdrive" shaken off the shelf, and a first-ever "Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun" in Eugene on July 11. Cuyahoga Falls got the "Can't Change The Past" and "Traveler's Rest" debuts on August 10, and Chicago closed the books with "Tennessee Before Daylight."

Three nights at Red Rocks (June 23–25) anchored the front half. In hindsight the whole thing reads like a hinge: the last full tour of one era, the quiet before Jimmy Herring walked out at Radio City that September and started the next one.