Writing on the road is just a fact of life for Robert Randolph and his Family Band.

The pedal steel guitarist and songwriter, one of the first “sacred steel” players in the Pentecostal church to gain attention in the secular music world, got on the subject of past Oregon shows during a recent conversation with GO! Magazine. He recalled his 2014 performance on Peter Frampton’s Guitar Circus tour in Medford as “a fun time” — but the jam he came up with during sound check stood out in his mind even more.

“What’s funny about last time we were there — there’s a song I was just listening to the other day, which we kind of made up during sound check, and it was from that same day,” Randolph said from his home in New Jersey, taking a break from — what else? — writing the next Family Band album. “So it’s weird. It’s in my computer as ‘Medford, Oregon,’ and it was a song that we just started jamming on. I sent it to the producer, I said, ‘Man, listen to this, I think this could be something.’ So hopefully, that’ll be something.”

Randolph teased a possible performance of the song, tentatively titled “Sunshine Coming,” when his band returns to Bend to play Deschutes Brewery’s 30th anniversary celebration at Drake Park on Saturday. The Family Band last played in town in 2010 at the Athletic Club of Bend, and Randolph said he’s looking forward to coming back here, as well as to Portland’s Waterfront Blues Festival on July 4.

“I always like coming out there to that whole Northwest area; there’s just great music fans,” Randolph said. “One thing about the people in the Northwest as opposed to people in the Northeast, you get a lot of people out there (who) love nature and getting outdoors and doing all that, and they all love music. It’s gonna be fun, man.”

Fans in Bend can expect more new material from the upcoming album, which Randolph said the band is getting ready to record. It will follow on the heels of last year’s Grammy-nominated “Got Soul,” the Family Band’s fifth album and first in four years following 2013’s “Lickety Split.”

In the interim, Randolph released a second album, 2015’s “Soul Food,” with supergroup The Word featuring keyboardist John Medeski. But with the band’s constant jamming leading to new songs, not to mention the momentum from the Grammy nod, another long break seems unlikely.

“I had so many ideas, and we were just trying to figure out the direction and the producer and then all of that kind of stuff,” Randolph said of recording “Got Soul.” “That’s why I was saying now, we’re not gonna take that long anymore because it really doesn’t make any sense. When you’re touring like we always do all year and you’re coming out with ideas and this and that, you might as well go right in and record ’em and make the best out of them. That’s what Hendrix and The Beatles and Zeppelin and all those guys used to do. I like that approach.”

Produced by Matt Pierson (Joshua Redman, Pat Metheny), “Got Soul” is typically wide-ranging, melding blues, jazz, funk and soul with Randolph and family’s church roots. The one-two punch of opening tracks “Got Soul” and “She Got Soul” (featuring guest vocalist Anthony Hamilton) sets the tone for the uplifting, rock ’n’ roll-meets-gospel vibe found throughout the album.

“It’s kind of like being a part of a church service where we come from, how you end one song and then the energy keeps going and then it goes into another thing,” Randolph said. “Both of those songs got written right in the same kind of date, in that same context. We were going and then after you get stuck with a verse — it always happens with me if I get stuck somewhere with a verse or a chorus or something or an idea, my brain will just go to somewhere else. And then next thing you know, we had had these two musical pieces that were like, wait a second, these are two different songs.”

Other guests on the album include soul singer Cory Henry and Hootie and the Blowfish frontman-turned-country star Darius Rucker, who sings lead on the album’s soulful first single, “Love Do What it Do.” The song’s country influence nods to the pedal steel’s long history in that genre, not to mention the cross-pollination between that genre and sacred steel players in the church.

“It was based in Nashville, our church headquarters, so all throughout the years, we would go to the country pedal steel shop, the store there, and we would talk to Paul Franklin — all those sort of guys would pop in,” Randolph said. “It was kind of like this whole sense of those guys appreciating what we do and we’re appreciating what they do. A lot of people really don’t know that; they think I’m just this guy that just started playing this instrument. Our organization and the history of what I do all come from a church organization, the Pentecostal church organization that started in the 1930s. That was our whole Chitlin’ Circuit, from my great-grandfather to my grandfather to my parents and everybody else. That’s all we did.”