Christopher O'Brian will be the first to tell you: "Road Warrior is a real term." In 2007, he and his bandmates in local roots reggae act Giant Panda Guerilla Dub Squad played 180 shows all over the country and in Jamaica, and O'Brian says they're on pace to match that this year.

"You can wait for the right record executive to stumble onto your MySpace page, but tried and true is just going out there and playing your product for people, and if they like it, they'll tell you that," O'Brian says during a recent phone interview.

Giant Panda kicked off the summer in late May with a performance at Mountain Jam IV, a music festival ranked by Rolling Stone as one of the top eight of summer. O'Brian says the band is booked pretty solid until September but will get a chance to return home to play at Party in the Park on Thursday, July 17.

When you look back at 2007 and count 180 shows, does that just blow you away?

Yeah. Absolutely. There's another term (besides Road Warrior) that becomes very literal when you're in a band. You're like, "Those kids caught a break. They got a record deal." That break is someone literally paying a person to drive you around in a bus and carry your gear. You got a break from having to do all of that on your own. That must be where that (word) came from.

How often do you get back to Rochester?

Not very often [laughs]. There's very little downtime. But again, this is obviously what we all want to be doing. I'm really excited. It's a good problem to have — a band having too many shows booked.

You guys have a live album coming out.

We are in the process of mastering what took us a long time to pick out — some live tracks. We only have so much to choose from. We're pretty insistent on the excellent sound quality. We took way too long to listen to our own music and nitpick it and try to decide what was what. And then we were finally like, "This is it. Let's put it out." We're really excited about what we ended up with.

Do you have a title for the album yet?

We do not. ...I can say that most of it is from Denver, Colo. But we definitely did a mix and match of shows (from different cities). I gotta say, when I was, like, 15, I thought that was a little misleading when you'd get a live disc. I guess I'm referring specifically to A Live One, the Phish album. I always thought it was the straight show as is. And it's totally not [laughs]. It's like from three different nights, and I found that out late in the game. I was like, "Damn dude."

You guys played Party in the Park last year. How excited are you to be doing it again?

That's a really big honor. It doesn't matter if you do it 10 times. That's a huge show that we've always loved to go to and we'll always be honored to play at. It's a Rochester summer staple. They have a lot of national acts coming through there, so that they asked us to do it is really awesome of them.