Sometimes the wheels come off

Hi friends,

We were a bit delayed in getting here, but maximum decompression has set in. After the tour we spent 3 days in Philly grabbing content for the new record. You’ll see more of that later. If you attended the impromptu listening party, thank you for making it such a wonderful evening.

After the extra days, Meredith and I ventured home. We unloaded essentials from the van. We binged 5 episodes of the Valley and finished a season of The Righteous Gemstones. I’ve torn my pedalboard apart. I’ve baked cookies. I’ve slept for more than 7 hours and the aches have slowly subsided.

Feels like a good time for a look back at the tour.

When I step back and look at the month (lol only a month) in its entirety, this was a killer tour. We hit places we’ve either never been or haven’t been to in years. Our fans largely showed up, and we were able to play to Armor’s fans every night in an attempt to win them over. We got ice cream all across the country.

And yet every single person in our touring party of seven said pretty much the same thing when we wrapped - “why was that one so hard?”.

Now, if you’ve read the two tour diary entries I did for this tour, you know I have a tendency to make things sound worse than they are, so I want to catch myself here. This tour was an absolute blast. Not one of us would say this tour sucked. But each tour ultimately gets boiled down to a few core memories. A summary.

We have the best job in the world. And felt like one of those stretches where the job is trying to break you.

I haven’t entirely parsed out why, but I have some ideas I’m working through.

Planning a tour is hard work. Planning a tour in a busy summer is even harder work. Getting that done and the tour announced in time to cut through the noise is even harder still. I’m eternally grateful I don’t have to do that anymore.

But I had multiple fans ask me about the routing. I don’t want to go that hard on this because people worked hard to get the show out on the road and it ultimately doesn’t matter, but to answer your questions:

1. Yes, starting a tour on the East coast, going out to California, and then ending the tour back basically where it started is tough in 4.5 weeks. Usually a tour like that would be routed in 6 weeks.

2. Yes, it’s not ideal to drive more than 300 miles on a show day. If you saw me at all during the week of Florida shows I’m sorry that I was half-asleep.

3. And finally, yes, I am sorry we didn’t announce sooner so that you didn’t already buy tickets to another show that fell close to our date, or worse, didn’t even hear about the show until it was too late to attend.

This is an issue of our own making. Our van is old. It has been through a lot. By the time we got back from this tour it has just hit 216,000 miles (we bought it at 65,000) and is on its 3rd transmission rebuild. And the UHaul trailer we rented wasn’t in much better shape.

When you’re on the road and constantly dealing with transportation issues, you get a little uneasy. Typically you’ll have one issue per tour. At the top of this tour, each band had one thing: AFS had a minor flat on their trailer; we had the same; Flycatcher had their windshield crack from a piece of rubber on the freeway.

Then we hit the desert and everything started to fall apart. For the rest of the tour we dealt with:

1. The weather stripping glue melting off our front windshield. It’s currently held together with gaff tape.

2. Our AC going out while accelerating. Thankfully Mike fixed that on our day off in LA or else we would’ve died in the heat.

3. A second flat outside Austin where the tire essentially disintegrated (so the wheel didn’t literally come off, but close enough).

4. Our rear window shattered while I was driving to Dallas heading into July 4 weekend. Thankfully the staff rep at the venue (shoutout Gary!) found someone to come fix it before the holiday, or again, we would’ve died in the heat and been soaked in the rain.

5. In Nashville I noticed that yet another of the Uhaul tires was bald and its sidewall was bulging. Had that fixed preemptively during soundcheck.

6. After Nashville on the start of our 7 hour show day drive, Mike and I both noticed the engine shift funny and checked the transmission fluid to discover it was brown (not good). We had to find a mechanic to flush the transmission and get us back on the road in a number of hours. (The fluid was fine before the tour. Either the tour was really that tough on the van, which is believable, or that’s another issue to solve).

So, yeah. I spent a lot of this tour putting out vehicle related fires with Mike (metaphorically, thank god). That will ruin anyone’s time.

We haven’t done a support tour since Sept 2024 with Alkaline Trio. We welcome the challenge of support tours, and understand their necessity, but that doesn’t mean we always love them.

There was less crossover with our fans and AFS fans than I expected (what I based my expectations on I have no idea). And I know we’ve reached a point where a lot of our fans don’t want to pay $40 to watch us in an opening slot. Totally valid.

This meant some of our sets were met with more apathy than others. We all personally love the challenge of trying to win people over — it’s part of the job, after all — but it also leads to that feeling of things being harder than they should.

I don’t think we’re alone in feeling this way. But as a band that has always been either too much or not enough to feel like we fit in anywhere (too punk/emo to be indie, not punk enough for the punks, etc.) we definitely have a chip on our shoulder, and every time we’re on a support tour there’s an insecurity of “damn do people like us?”.

The answer, of course, is some do. Some don’t. So it goes.

The upside to being out on tour is getting to chat with you all. Contrary to what I just said, it makes me feel like I belong somewhere. I’m still trying to figure out what I mean in this section, but all I can say (and it’s not a surprise given the subject matter of this band) is that the life just feels fundamentally difficult right now for seemingly every person I meet.

I can’t begin to suss out the litany of reasons why. But I know that the cost of things is a huge stressor. I’ll have more on this, but we’re going to try to fix at least that problem this fall with a fully independent venue (read: no Livenation) tour where we’ve set our ticket prices to $20 (so they’ll hopefully land at roughly the $25 mark if there are processing fees). We’re also trying to partner with organizations we love in different markets to try to generate some good vibes off of a tour. I’m excited to bring it to life, since it’s the brainchild of our manager and myself.

It’s not lost on me that we’re the lucky ones who get to be in the band on the road. It’s why making a post like this stresses me out. I don’t want to come across as complaining! I want to debrief so I can fix things when possible. I just happen to also be doing it publicly because I’m insane.

Like I said, I’m actually going to look back fondly on this tour. When we chat about it next year, we’ll say something like, “Oh yeah that was super fun and weirdly hard.” Or we’ll probably just complain about how hot it was.

But here are the quick hits on the positives. I probably should have said these sooner to set up a compliment sandwich structure, but oh well.

• Our new sound person Xavier is an absolute legend and I’m so excited to bring him into the fold.

• Our Merch Manager Courtney has also started taking photos of us during the shows and is incredible at it. She’ll be doing more content moving forward.

• The new merch designs went hard. People particularly liked the tour shirt Courtney designed with our actual pets on it.

• The actual touring party got along so perfectly that it’s actually kind of bonkers. No egos. Just 3 bands sweating it out. Flycatcher was a revelation live as a band I hadn’t listened to a ton. They’re also just great friends now.

• I think the band itself has never sounded better or more focused live. I’m ready for the next album to get hear and rip some new songs live.

• Gas prices didn’t completely wreck us. I did a rough budget close out and our gas expenses totaled up to about what we made on an average show night (guarantee & merch). Not great, but not a total tour killer.

• The van didn’t explode.

• Almost everyone’s parents got to see a show.

• Ruben’s mom made us vegan burritos in LA, something I’ve missed dearly.

• I didn’t change my pedalboard once the entire tour.

• I was able to meet and chat with some amazing folks who told me their stories.

• We got to play music for y’all. Cmon.

-D

Watching:
The Valley and Righteous Gemstones. I somehow missed Gemstones when it came out, despite everyone telling me how good it was. I blame it being the depths of Covid.

We also viewed Good Luck Have Fun Don’t Die. I thought it was fun and fine.

Reading:
Shift by Hugh Howley. With Silo coming back I got the urge to dive into the second book of the series that I’ve had sitting here since Xmas.

Listening:
The new Menzingers album. Kitt’s Hummock, which Xavier used to check the room every day. And Mer has me listening to Sexy Unique Podcast, which I’m lowkey loving.