Today is a normal day for Dustin Kensrue. Seated comfortably in a tour bus plastered with Honda advertisements on its exterior, the Thrice vocalist and guitarist has a few minutes to relax before reaching Detroit, where he’ll perform another arena-sized show alongside indie bigwigs Dashboard Confessional and The Get Up Kids.

OK, so maybe “normal” is a relative term.

Kensrue is exactly where a thousand wannabe screamers wish they could be right now. It’s been a little less than a year since his band inked a deal and released a successful album with Universal subsidiary Island Records, proving emotional metal had a financially viable place in the majors, with current sales topping 300,000 albums.

Since then, he’s had more than a few rare opportunities, from visiting most of Europe with the Deconstruction Tour to working his current gig on the Honda Civic Tour.

But none of this seems to be the motivation behind Kensrue. Spend five minutes talking to him, and you’ll wonder if the whole success thing was some sort of bizarre cosmic accident.

“I actually didn’t know it was the Civic Tour until after we’d signed on,” Kensrue says. “We have the same booking agent as Dashboard, and he was like, ‘Hey, you wanna go do some shows with Chris [Carrabba, Dashboard vocalist]?’ and I was like, ‘Yeah, that’d be cool.'”

On the surface, touring under the Honda moniker seems to be a contradiction for Thrice. Besides writing songs filled with the punk mantra of social and political commentary, the band members practice what they preach — a portion of record sales is donated to the Syrentha J. Savio Endowment, which provides funding for women with breast cancer who can’t afford treatment.

“It’s such a big problem, people not having health care in this country because it’s so expensive,” Kensrue says.

“If you do get sick, and you don’t have insurance, you’re pretty much screwed. There’s no way that you can possibly start to afford all of the medical treatment you need. At some point it’s going to affect all of us.”

But as for the commercialism of the Civic Tour, Kensrue says it doesn’t affect the Thrice philosophy in any way.

“It’s kind of a complicated issue, but I really haven’t formed much of an opinion on it,” he says. “It seems like if someone wants to pay for your bus and wrap it in advertising, and you can save money for your kids to go to college, then I don’t know why you would say no to that. I drive a Civic, so it’s not really an issue for me anyway.”

Kensrue jokes the real conflict may be between his band and the younger, more “sensitive” crowd Dashboard Confessional’s shows tend to attract.

“There’s funny stuff on our [Internet] message board, like kids pulling quotes off the Dashboard message board where kids are complaining about us. This one girl was like, ‘These guys should not be on [the tour], because their fans are, like, 25 and 300 pounds, and krazy.’ With a ‘k.'”

Ironically, this may be the closest Thrice has ever been to sounding like Dashboard. After drummer Riley Breckenridge hurt his back during the Warped Tour last year, the remaining members of Thrice were forced to play several shows acoustically.

Since then, the band has performed acoustically with friends and labelmates Thursday for Apple Computer’s iTunes Music Store and recorded a single for Fearless Records’ “Punk Goes Acoustic” album. The band is also distributing a limited-edition acoustic EP during concerts.

Kensrue says he enjoys the amp-free change, but doesn’t expect the pared-down sound to make it to a Thrice full-length any time soon.

“At first we thought it would be a good opportunity to showcase a different side of the band,” Kensrue says. “I think for us, it’s kind of a fun thing to do sometimes, but even when I play acoustic for fun, I feel like I’d rather play other people’s songs that work better in that forum than ours.”

Once this tour wraps up, Kensrue says the band will begin writing material for a follow-up album to last year’s “The Artist in the Ambulance.” He hopes the album is a success, and places a lot of faith in his label.

“I’m really pleased we did what we did when we signed to Island. I think it was the right decision for us at that time,” he says.