Hurricane Bertha (2008) weakened to a tropical storm on July 13, and a large upper-level low over the central Atlantic steered it east and southeast. After generally maintaining its strength for several days, an eye redeveloped and convection became more symmetric about the feature on July 18, prompting the NHC to upgrade Bertha to a hurricane around 18:00 UTC that day. The storm rapidly accelerated ahead of a trough off the East Coast of the United States, forcing Bertha into rapidly cooler waters. Its wind field became extremely asymmetric and deep convection near the center dissipated, indicative of an extratropical transition that Bertha
What Were You Hoping For? the album with a 20-date national headlining tour, his first national tour since 2008. It began on September 19 at Webster Hall in New York City and concluded on October 13 at Yoshi's in San Francisco. He performed with members of his session band, drummer Ruth Price and keyboardist Peter Dyer, as well as guitarist Douglas Showalter. Prior to the tour, they had played at the 21st NAACP Theatre Awards gala on August 29. "What You Were Hoping For?" was met with rave reviews from critics. At Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream