Train's Pat Monahan on the band's career, new single, live album and San Francisco

Pat Monahan, lead singer for Grammy-winning pop rock band Train, spent his formative years in northwestern Pennsylvania, moving from Erie to California when he was 19.

“Do I miss the lake effect snow?” Monahan said with a laugh in a recent call. “I can’t say that I do.”

Although he’s now based in the Pacific Northwest, he still has ties to the region, including a stop here in May to attend former Pittsburgh Steelers player Troy Polamalu’s Resilience Bowl fundraiser.

Monahan will be back on Thursday, July 11, when Train’s Summer Road Trip tour visits Stage AE in Pittsburgh, with Yacht Rock Revue opening.

Known for songs like “Hey, Soul Sister,” “Drops of Jupiter” and “Drive By,” Train has been going steady for more than 30 years, with three Grammys and one song with more than a billion streams on Spotify.

”I feel like I never knew if I would make a big impact in music, but I always thought that I would last a while,” he said. “I’ve always been a runner, but I’m not a sprinter, but I can run distance. And I just thought my life is very parallel to that.”

When it comes to his songwriting, Monahan said he feels like he does a better job of expressing himself than when he first started, but he added a caveat.

“Sometimes I do, but songwriting is like golf. You’ll go out and you’ll be so good and then you’ll have 12 (crappy) rounds of golf, and you’re like, ‘What happened?’ ” he said. “And so that’s songwriting. Once in a while, you’ll just be like, man, it all worked. And most times it doesn’t. Songwriting, I would say one out of 10 things that I work on is really worth listening to, but you have to just work through it to get to it.”

In support of this tour, Train released a new single, “Long Yellow Dress,” in April.

“It was a song about a dream I had and trying to locate a woman wearing a yellow dress that I could never get to, so it became a song that sounds like a pretty fun summer song,” he said. “… I’m hoping that we’ll see a whole bunch of long yellow dresses this summer.”

The track isn’t slated to be on an album, but Monahan said he’ll be heading to Nashville after this tour to finish off an album, with a possible fall or winter completion. In the meantime, Train played a show in April that was recorded for a live album, tentatively scheduled for a summer release.

“The live album was important because of the venue. We were just in the U.K. and Europe and got to play Royal Albert Hall in London, and that is such an iconic venue that we decided that is where the live album should take place,” he said. “I’ve watched it and listened to it, and it’s really something else, man. This place is so cool. It sounds amazing. The crowd was incredible. Just this venue, itself, is worth the watch.”

Train is also celebrating the 15th anniversary of their 2009 album, “Save Me, San Francisco,” which featured “Hey, Soul Sister.”

“It’s a really strange thing,” Monahan said of why that song is so enduring. “If it becomes part of the fabric of society, I think it just can outlast a lot of things, whether it’s just the words, ‘Hey soul sister’ or whatever the relatable part of it is, it just keeps relating to younger people because young people rule the music world and always have.”

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Train is long associated with San Francisco, a city Monahan said doesn’t deserve the bad rap it sometimes gets nationally.

“I think San Francisco has always been a leading city in the world, and, whenever there’s some type of disruption, there’s always been something positive that comes out of it, whether it’s drug-related stuff or homeless situations, it gets solved,” he said. “And San Francisco is a leading, cutting-edge type of place where they don’t want to like ship homeless people to somebody else’s city.

“I think their goal is to actually help these people, and I think that takes a little longer. And I love that about San Francisco — their empathy for people and their wanting for a community to be healed is pretty big-hearted. It’d be a lot easier to put people on buses and send them to other places, but that’s not a solve.”