Words matter. These are the best Touring Quotes from famous people such as Shavo Odadjian, Henry Rollins, Mithali Raj, Keith Urban, Johnny Van Zant, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
System is always System for me. If System’s touring or making a record, I’m there.
Motivation has always been a fascinating factor when considering a touring artist, especially when the years stack up. What keeps one out there year after year?
We get to play every team before the World Cup, touring in different conditions besides a few series at home. It gives a lot of opportunities to the youngsters. As we play more, we get to see who a quality player is and what plans and strategies would work for the team.
I tend to write better when I’m not touring.
When you’re 17, touring is fun.
‘Easy’ is not a word I would ever use to describe touring.
One of the downfalls of not being in Stone Sour was I sat at home for two and a half years, and I hadn’t ever done that since we started touring in 1999. I was really nervous and freaked out.
My first tour I did was The Warped Tour, and I was likening myself to the bearded lady at the circus because not only was I an actor touring, doing rock n’ roll, but I was also a female front person making really muscular, male-dominated rock music.
Id been touring in Japan and Australia and was due to play in America when Covid struck. I couldnt get back to England for a whole week, so I ended up spending it in Miami on my own.
It was about this time that I began experiencing the beginnings of my battles with an anxiety disorder. We were touring a lot and there were some developing personal problems within the band.
It feels like it’s just starting in America and the UK. It’s great to have a loyal fanbase in Australia and New Zealand. People in America say how polished our band are, but that didn’t happen overnight; that came from doing all this touring back home.
To me, the only good reason to be touring is if you still have something good to share instead of just revisiting past glories.
I used to think that I could be successful if I pretended to be a 23-year-old black woman. I wanted to find a young black woman who would be willing to go in on this with me. I would write her novels, and then she would do the touring. I always thought I was too old and the wrong color.
I don’t really know what ‘selling out’ is exactly. I would sell out if I could, but nobody’s buying it. I would love to go mainstream, but my comedy is too edgy. It’s always too dirty. It’s always too filthy. I’m dying to sell out. But I love doing comedy, I love touring, and I think I would do everything for free.
Touring is very tough.
Even when we were stuck touring, earning $100 a day, I never thought I’d even make it that far.
There are a lot of actors that don’t like touring and will do just about anything to get out of it, but I loved it. I loved the cities, the people, and the new experiences it offered.
Anyone can exceed expectations in one way or another and I hope to prove that when I race alongside, not just able-bodied drivers, but the best Touring Car drivers in the UK.
I don’t really work on songs when we’re touring because there’s just too much other stuff going on.
I think touring is hard.
There’s nothing more that I enjoy doing as much as touring. It’s basically being able to connect with the fans without all the madness that goes on in my regular life.
We all had our strengths. I focused on mine, which was kind of the business side of things and more about the touring and the creative… Nick was all about the music, and Joe was about the entertainment aspect and the music.
Touring doesn’t have to be a harried, cliched way of life.
I don’t think I ever had a certain image of what touring was like… I think when you’re young, you think it’s very glamourous, but it’s not.
One of the coolest things about touring around, actually, is getting to meet people, and getting to pick up on things that other people like. So many times, people come up to me after a reading and say, ‘You must have read this,’ or ‘You must have seen this,’ or ‘Do you listen to this?’ Usually I haven’t.
It wouldn’t be fair to drag a child round the world, touring.
Starting young has definitely helped my success. All the experience I gained by touring with other players as a backing artist helped to prepare me for my own big break.
But I don’t mind, I’m a bit of a touring animal. When I’m on tour that is the greatest thrill for me, playing to a live audience.
When I’m not touring, I sing at home, either at the piano or I’ll pick up my guitar, singing old Buck Owens songs.
I don’t actually like touring.
Touring the world was almost like a side project that got out of control. It’s like two incredibly demanding full-time jobs that I’m trying to do at once.
I remember having to quit school and quit my job. I just sort of moved all my stuff into other people’s places. Within, like, six months, I was able to earn enough money from touring to rent a place again.
So when you start touring, women are definitely going to check you out first.
I don’t mind traveling that much when I can go somewhere and stay there for a while, but touring is different. You rarely see anything. You get there early in the morning and you’re resting all day, and you go in and do a sound check, and you do the show, and then bam you’re gone.
I mean, what’s great about touring is that’s what you do. You’re in a constant state of motion and then you stop to do a show and you move onto the next city. All you have to do is do the show. That’s the only responsibility that you have.
One of the negative sides of a really intense arc as a touring band is there are big gaps in your memory because you’re so exhausted.
It’s good to be playing one and a half hour again. In the States we played like an hour and when you got onstage it felt like all of a sudden you are already done your set. But now, it feels like we are touring again.
I just kept making records, touring in Europe a lot, and then I had a baby in 2006, so my life has been very, very much family-orientated.
I guess some of today’s programming has rubbed off on me because I find myself having to set time around for touring, putting that together and then setting time around for recording.
We’re known as a touring band, not a singles band.
Touring is a tough plane to get off the ground, and it takes a lot of hard work and a lot of investments.
The thing that is comforting about being a touring musician is whenever I say bye to my friends, I’m like, ‘I don’t know when I’ll see you again but it’ll be sooner than I think and if it’s not soon then it won’t matter.’
The last time I put out ‘Raw,’ that boosted me up in the underground to one of the top underground artists who was making moves and touring around the world.
I feel like touring is a man’s game. And I don’t think that’s sexist; I just think, on tour, you can’t really take care of yourself the way you want to.
Touring a segregated America – forever being stopped and harassed by white cops hurt you most ‘cos you don’t realise the damage. You hold it in. You feel empty, like someone reached in and pulled out your guts. You feel hurt and dirty, less than a person.
I’d been touring for so long, seven years. For a year and a half I’d just been curious about what it was like not to tour. It’s like if you were to lift a 100-pound barbell with your right arm for seven years, eventually you’d get really curious about what your left arm was capable of.
There’s this misconception out there that at any level of celebrity, you have someone to do hair and makeup when you’re out touring, but no, it is just not the case. I do it all myself.
I decided to open up The Bailey Wine Cellar because after visiting Napa and touring the wineries there, I genuinely became interested in and more curious about the wine culture.
You have to be real sharp when you’re touring. I’m dull normal at home. So when I come off the road, my kids have to put up with Mom making cracks every five minutes for a couple of days.
I guess I don’t know if I’m comfortable with fame or touring or promo or any of that stuff, and I really discovered that I love working for people and co-writing and working under someone.
The first time I ever went out of the country, it was to London. I was with the choir from my college, and we were touring around all these different churches. I loved it so much I tried to find a way to stay there.
I don’t know why comedians moan about touring; you get driven to a town, stay in a hotel, work for an hour and a half with nice people, and eat fatty service station food. There’s nothing not to like.
Touring, it’s really difficult to actually make a band work, and I think that’s why there’s so few bands that do work, actually, ’cause there’s so much that goes into it.
So many people have told me that it’s quite different playing out in the States, and obviously, as a musician, touring in the States is kind of the Holy Grail.
I get stage fright really bad sometimes, so touring has been hard on me in a lot of ways. But despite that, I love performing.
When I was touring with Peas, I was able to make the crowd feel the energy. When I said: ‘put your hands up or make some noise,’ they just did it.
Touring is completely different to me than being in the studio.
Large podcasts have a successful and sustainable business model in live show touring.
I love traveling and touring, but I have to bring the little things that make me feel at home.
I really loved touring with my band, but it felt like we would spend a lot of time playing in empty rooms – empty clubs. We had some good successes, but it’s so physically hard to load up a van and drive all day.
I didn’t finish high school. I tried to as an adult, but with all this touring, I had to quit.
Touring is tough. You’re almost in a haze because you don’t really know where you are half the time: You’re in a hotel room one moment, and the next thing you know, you’re onstage performing for 60,000 people, then you’re back on an airplane. It’s very hectic and I couldn’t do it without my family.
I don’t think I would get married again; I don’t know if I’m a very good candidate because of all the touring I do.
Once you start out, you are kind of finding out who you are, and then by the time you get to the second album or you’ve been touring a lot, doing live shows or whatever, the sound starts to shift slightly to something that is more the true essence of what the band really is.
Patrick and Joe were so young when we started the band. As slow as it was, with all the touring and crappy clubs we played, we still never had time to stop and reflect. When we took a break, it finally gave us time to reflect and grow up.
I can’t speak for other artists; every group has a different approach. For us, it will always be important to keep working hard, dancing better, writing better songs, touring, and setting an example.
When we try and blend the two together, the songwriting and the touring like we did before, it doesn’t really work. We tend to become very focused on what we are doing. And we tend to be a little bit one-track-minded.
Touring can be repetitive at times.
Touring and promoting and recording take a lot of time, it’s just getting the right balance that’s important.
We were touring the States tied to a load of drum machines and sequencers and synthesizers, playing to hundreds of thousands of people and yet feeling strangely removed from the music.
I’m glad we turned into a big-time touring band later in life. In fact, it’s almost like we planned it out that way.
The U.K. is one of the places that has always been an advocate of my music and I spend a lot of time touring here. I’ve got family and friends over here, but more than that, there’s a large Jamaican community and the Jamaican culture is very widespread in the U.K. which I love.
I’ve done every kind of touring known to mankind. I’ve played the big and the small places.
I went through a period of being disillusioned with touring.
It wasn’t easy for me to socialize with other kids when I got back from touring. I felt different. Like we all do, but I didn’t feel like I got all the codes. I was a little awkward.
When I was growing up, there was no such thing as a touring ukulele player.
The real test of a musician is live performance. It’s one thing to spend a long time learning how to play well in the studio, but to do it in front of people is what keeps me coming back to touring.
It’s pretty weird when you are just touring all the time and you don’t have a normal life. You’re out of touch with reality too much.
I’m scared of audiences. One show in Amsterdam I was so nervous, I escaped out the fire exit. I’ve thrown up a couple of times. Once in Brussels, I projectile vomited on someone. I just gotta bear it. But I don’t like touring. I have anxiety attacks a lot.
If we weren’t in this band, some of us wouldn’t be playing at all. You have tiffs with someone when he has smelly feet in the touring van, but we all respect each other as friends first.
I landed gigs touring with The Jonas Brothers and Britney Spears!
A Hawk and a Hacksaw may be from America, but the band’s music sure isn’t: Since the beginning, Eastern Europe has been an unwavering source of musical inspiration, not to mention fertile touring ground, for the group.
I much prefer touring to anything else. Studio work is great, and can be hugely satisfying, but live work has the excitement and the lifestyle that I love.
With ‘Believe’ bringing really big success for me outside of the U.K. for the first time, it meant I have been touring around the world and that led to a gap from the studio. I really feel like the gap has done me the world of good. Throughout that time I was able to collect songs that I really loved.
Touring is a young man’s game, but after 30 years of it, I want to stay home.
Growing up, I played in different bands and did a lot of self-booked touring and traveling around, and my sister was driving us on tour, and we’re playing for nobody and literally begging my friends that I went to high school with to buy tickets to our shows.
I’ve done that I was touring a couple of years ago with R. Kelly and the Lillith Fair, I would do the late night underground gigs as well because it’s always around those times that there was a hot song, either on the radio or in the clubs, it would just be simultaneous.
Getting on the bus and touring was my life. And when that was not around, I felt myself a bit lost at times, because that was all I had.
When I moved to New York, I felt very strong emotionally and mentally. Aside from touring, I’d spent a couple of years alone and because of that, I was able to go out in the world again.
Touring can be tough; the crew and I travel everywhere by a big pink bus, and live in petrol stations.
Being in a band can be really toxic to being in a relationship, considering all the touring and everything. Sometimes when you’re on tour, it feels like you’re living the same day over and over again.
I did quite a lot of menial jobs. I was a waiter, an inventory clerk touring round properties listing cups and saucers, and a laserquest marshal.
I wouldn’t be out here touring constantly if I didn’t hope that my music was going to do something to somebody.
People wanted to know where I was and what I was doing. Was I still recording? Was I touring? Was I putting a band together? Was I writing songs? Was I even still singing?
My thing with New York was that it felt so insular. When I went to L.A., everybody I knew was a cool, amazing musician. In New York, they’d be hunkered down trying to form a band. But in L.A., guys in bands were also playing with other artists, touring with other artists, and collaborating with other artists.
When you make albums like I do, and it’s based off fanfare and based off touring – I make these albums, and I get on the road. It’s not really a radio-driven thing. I get on the road, and I see my fans, and I touch each and every last one of them.
You can always boil down the life of a musician to touring, playing, and writing.
I played around with the idea of touring with a soul revue, with Smokey Robinson, Sam Moore, Darlene Love, people like that.
You live in a bubble, generally, when you’re touring and recording – you’re in confined – in alone space, wherever you are, in the dressing room or in the studio – so sometimes it’s hard to grasp that bigger picture of things that are going on.
I’ve spent the last 10 years constantly touring and haven’t had much reason to stick around anywhere. I’m 34 now, and I’ve got a girlfriend and a house and two cats. I don’t want to run away; I like where I’m at.
When we’re touring America or Europe, we use our own plane and a great advantage of that is it cuts out an awful lot of time checking in. You literally drive up to the plane, get on and then drive off at the other end.
I’m going to write, and after two years, when I’ve quit touring, if a special event comes up that I want to do, by all means I will do it, but as far as a structured tour goes, at the last date of 2014 goes, that will be it for touring.
I had a really successful 2013, ’14, ’15. Touring, just doing my thing. Super – I mean, can’t complain about nothing. And my road manager got killed. And it ruined everything. Now, I tell people – I don’t know if this is a word. But I tell people that that re-sensitized me.
All the things people hate about touring, I’m excited for, because I’ve never done it before. I’m excited to see places I’ve never seen and be in the van and see if I get carsick while reading.
I remember touring the Medici palace in Florence when I was younger and I was entranced by the beauty and elegance of every space.
I’ve always wanted to be a pop star of sorts because I love the whole touring gig.
Touring with Blink helped introduce people to Alkaline Trio who otherwise wouldn’t have ever heard of us.
The best part of touring is the opportunity to make the music. You get to do what you love and have the ability to go out on stage every night and create.
I did a lot of Shakespeare touring when I was in college in Montana.
I left school just shy of 17: I’d started going into touring and that situation.
I’ve been really fortunate with touring and sales and all those things because I have such a loyal fan base.
Nowadays, it’s like two different arenas, recording and touring. When I started way back in the day, doing both was nothing, you didn’t have to think about it, the road and recording.
One already feels like an anachronism, writing novels in the age of what-ever-this-is-the-age-of, but touring to promote them feels doubly anachronistic. The marketplace is showing an increasing intolerance for the time-honored practice of printing information on paper and shipping it around the country.
It is like an addiction: I get addicted to performing and touring. I get itchy and think, ‘I’ve got to do this.’
We always have a great time touring Germany, but one of my favourite museums in the world is Museum Ludwig, an incredible contemporary art museum in Cologne. I could spend all day in it.
I’m doing a lot of touring and things have been really busy for me.
I got my group together when I was about thirteen. We had a local radio show, and then we started touring for the principal of the high school – he was in the Lions Club, and so we were the entertainment.
It is hard being in a relationship when you are a dancer as I have been touring a lot all over the world.
I wrote ‘Torches’ before experiencing touring as a band. I really had no idea what they would sound like live, and that was something we had to figure out along the way.
Touring is what we work so hard for – performing every night to huge crowds and getting to see all our fans close up.
It was a big surprise when I started to get attention in Sweden, going from biochemistry studies to touring and living from music only. There were a couple of years while I went to university when I was OK with thinking of music as just a nice recreation.
I definitely think that touring is a really crazy lifestyle and makes it hard to live a normal life and have relationships and friendships.
Being with my family is very important to me, and touring is very important to me, too, because it’s who I am. It’s what I do.
I couldn’t be touring unless my husband was on the road with me, taking care of our son while I’m onstage and doing interviews.
I hate touring beyond measure. I don’t like all the travelling and the hotel rooms. But the hour and a half on stage each night keep me going.
It’s one thing to be twenty and touring the world, but doing it in your forties, you wake up with aches and pains.
In 1968 the Arts Council managed to get a grant from the treasury to buy up a lot of derelict touring theatres and put them back in the hands of the local authorities.
I used to suffer from a lot of regret while touring. Regret at having to leave certain places, people and situations, or just a beautiful day.
I don’t need to be the singer of Nightwish 24/7 when I’m not touring or when I want to go to the supermarket in my comfy pants.
I didn’t have the opportunity to go to college. I was busy touring since the age of 17.
Andy Grammer is probably the closest friend I have in the music industry, so touring with him was just incredible. He’s such a soulful, kind guy, and he gives great advice. And he also scares me a lot. He does a lot of pranks.
If I’m not touring, I wake up late – 10, 11 A.M. – and one of my favorite things is to go for brunch with my wife.
Touring is a tough business.
I’m super serious about that stuff. I mean, it’s rare that I sit down at a drum set when I’m not touring, because we tour so much.
And touring is difficult when everybody’s heads aren’t in the same place.
We’d been out touring for a couple of years before we signed with Sony and everything.
I love making music, and I love touring. I love that I get to wake up and play music. I don’t like being away from my wife and kids.
I really don’t work a whole lot as far as touring, but I do stand-up every night of my life, no matter where I am.
I got fed up with being in bands. I spent a couple of years touring the country in a smoked filled band, doing lots of drugs and being really unhealthy.
Right when I started touring, there was this wariness I had of the world outside of my small town. But I’m not that person anymore, and I was never completely that person.
I think we could have done a lot more great music, so I was disappointed that we didn’t continue making records and touring, but it’s hard to argue with 10 good years.
While touring in and outside Mumbai to do theatre, I got some good offers to act in films, which brought me success and I continued to do movies.
A lot of the stuff I’ve accumulated over the last few years of touring I thought was really interesting. Like sounds, sound bites, and beats even, but they weren’t good dance beats they weren’t ones anyone would want to rap over or anything.
When you give your life over to your touring schedule, it’s so grueling, you have to have moments where you have your own comfort places.
As opposed to touring for three years and then going into the studio and writing an album, I think this record is representative of a lot of everyday people.
My father, while touring Ramanathapuram, came to know about my affiliation with the BJP when newspapers carried articles about the new faces of the party.
I’m actually enjoying the touring life, although the worst part is being away from my three young children.
In general, I usually don’t really go by or live my life by a clock, and outside of touring, I don’t really ask anyone else to. It’s not out of lack of respect for anyone or intentional.
Touring gets really lonely.
Making a record and being a touring artist is about cooperation between spirit, craft, emotion, and focus.
Touring is exciting.
Everybody thinks that touring is really glamourous, but I pretty much sit in a room all day. I have a sort of office where I do emails, and I go for a run, and then at the end of the night, I go to bed. It’s not like some crazy party.
Money’s really – you know, song writing, yes, there’s money to be made and things like that. But really, when you talk about the real money, you talk about touring. No question.
After graduating college in 2010, I got to work – writing and co-writing all the time, playing and touring in bands, playing for other people’s bands, working in coffee shops all over town.
After I quit my band, I definitely was so full, like I’m so full I could never eat again. I had that kind of feeling where the elements, like the touring stuff, were harder for me and I definitely felt fine not experiencing it again.
I didn’t spend much time in America, which probably was a mistake. To someone else, having a number one in America would be enough to get them touring.
Bands are actively seeking more film involvement – because the days of recording albums and MTV and even touring, to some extent, are gone.
I think comics in New York are interested in being comics. And there’re comics in L.A. who are touring comics, who are certainly more interested in stand-up, but a lot of L.A. stand-ups are really looking to do something else.
I had family who exposed me to all sorts of different media involving actors – films, theatrical productions touring through Boston. My grandparents, particularly my mother’s parents, were huge fans of all the arts, and they took me to these shows and exhibits at a very young age, so I was just immersed in it.
My big break came at 22 years old when I joined the Mercedes Benz touring championship team.
I basically learned hip-hop from *NSYNC. And then while I was touring in theater shows, and I couldn’t take classes in hip-hop but I wanted to, I just watched Justin Timberlake concerts.
Well, I’ve never been in a touring rock band, it was all just high school and college, playing toga parties in frat houses.
I love touring; if it were up to me I’d be touring all the time.
I’m 30, and I’ve been touring since I was 15. So it’s been a long journey to get here.
I knew I had I a better album than ‘Up the Bracket’ in me, and I wanted to record it. But I was told we’ve got to keep touring, keep promoting. That was the first time I realised we were on a conveyor belt.
Touring helped me understand where I needed to be better in my music.
We’ve always enjoyed touring, which is fortunate because we’re always on the road. The most difficult part is that time passes by so quickly. It’s hard to pay attention to your normal life because shows are all-encompassing.
On tour, I’ll get up at 5 p.m. and go to bed at 8 in the morning. With fishing, it’s the exact opposite. Fishing is the only healthy thing I do. Touring is such a grind; it’s the opposite of healthy.
I’m quite grateful to the BBC. They helped me back onto the touring circuit.
I’m asked to drive touring cars, I’m asked to drive IndyCar, but I think Formula One is much more hi-tech and that’s where I want to be in as long as I can.
Being a drag superstar, traveling the world and touring, it really is not as glamorous as you’d think it is. There’s lots of airport drama and bags and buses and hotels. Dating and having a social life are impossible.
Touring with Yes was generally great fun, and I got on well with the rest of the guys, but we were like chalk and cheese in many respects. I was unique in the band as a card-carrying Conservative.
I toured in Europe first, before I did any touring in the U.S. It was with Jimmy Nail and others.
I feel like what’s important is to interact with your fans online. Touring is really important to stay connected with your fans.
The thing is, I’ll always be a touring artist. It’s what I am; that’s what I love doing.
Although I have been pretty vocal about hating touring, the only part of touring I don’t like is being on the bus and bouncing around.
Touring is great because I love to travel.
I have chosen to keep my personal life separate from my music, as the two are exclusive from each other, and I want to remain that way. I’ll talk music, production, writing songs, touring with anyone but keep religion, politics and world affairs off the table, as my expertise is in songs and music.
I’ve forgotten what it feels like to be in one place for more than a day… But we signed up for this. This is our dream. We sat down and said this is what we want to do, play music and touring.
Songwriting is the other weight on the opposite side of the scale from touring. They balance me out creatively.
King Crimson will soon be touring parts of Europe.
The touring part is really mixed. You love to play and you can’t wait to go, but you don’t want to leave.
Touring around the world, I think there’s no single country where we haven’t eaten chili crab.
Touring is real demanding. You swing between sadness and euphoria. But for us to cry about it isn’t fair.
I just love singing, songwriting and touring.
My main professional experience is touring in a rock band.
Your time is spent making records, planning, touring – not counting the days until another guy’s concert. There are some newer artists I like in a casual, passing way, but I couldn’t tell you the bass player’s name or name two songs off of their new record.
Bun E.’s a member of the band, but he’s not touring, and he’s not recording… We’ve had our differences, but we’re all settled up now, and hopefully we can forget about that era. These decisions that Cheap Trick makes, Bun E. is part of.
Being able to tour and experience all of the stuff that comes from touring, and then being able to come back to Nashville, it’s almost like therapy to be able to get into a session and talk about all of the things that I’m going through. It’s so much more real to me.
My whole life was writing, recording and touring over and over again. At some point I realised I wasn’t enjoying myself any more.
I’ll Uber to who has the best expressos, and I’ll take my iPad and go get a coffee… It’s really given the touring situation a whole other layer of enjoyment.
Touring is a weird thing. It’s like getting married to four different people.
While we were touring for ‘Vacation,’ we weren’t aware that the record wasn’t doing well. It was a good tour, but the album didn’t go over with critics.
I make my money off of touring and merchandise. And I’m lucky I have really loyal fans that understand how it works and support.
By the time Guns n’ Roses spent 28 months from 1991 to 1993 touring the ‘Use Your Illusion’ albums, the tour staff sometimes approached 100 people. We were carrying not only backup girl singers, a horn section, and an extra keyboard player, but also chiropractors, masseuses, a singing coach, and a tattoo artist.
I don’t like touring. I’ve done so much of it, you know.
I’m dedicated to touring the rest of my life.
I just kept touring and touring until it became second nature to go onstage, perform, and sing.
When I hit my 20s, I took a chill pill and relaxed because throughout my teens I was churning out an album a year. It was a treadmill of work then recording, promoting and touring.
Back in the days of the Smiths, when we first started touring England – this is, like, 1984 – there were these two girls. They were literally vicar’s daughters, and they used to follow us to every gig, no matter where we went.
Madonna would not have done a 360 deal with us just because of our touring capability. We had to prove to her and others that we have been working on and built a very good execution capacity at Artist Nation.
I find that touring keeps your voice in great shape.
My dad’s family were political and he was always a theatrical creature, whereas my mum is really musical and her father was the touring pianist with Nat King Cole. My family was an explosive mixture of politics, religion and music – no wonder I turned out how I did.
When I’m not touring I really enjoy the ease of cooking at home.
I can still make a living with touring. And maybe you buy a t-shirt. And I would rather 10 million people get my record and listen to it for free than 500,000 that I coerced to pay $15 for it, you know?
I’ve been touring through Texas since I was 15, on my first tour ever.
For years, I survived as an artist on grants and touring as a dancer with dance companies, and I was living underground like so many artists, hand-to-mouth and so forth. And I never had the power to make decisions.
I had kids at age 47, and very late in life, and I’d been doing it for 30 straight years, writing songs, making a record and touring and starting the process right over.
When you’re a touring musician, you’re always turning over new rocks, and there’s always a certain level of tension in your life. The music business, and the travel that comes with it, is stressful, challenging, redundant, exhausting, exciting, and often very depressing.
When I left Free back in 1972, I didn’t play ‘All Right Now’ until about 1996, when I was touring with Jason Bonham, and we were supporting the tribute record we had done to Muddy Waters.
I love touring. You get to meet so many people and experience different cultures.
Touring doesn’t kill me and I can handle it.
When we came off the tour for the last album, we started on this one. We’ve just been chipping away at it. We’re not in that much of a hurry, because when we release a Blur album, that’s a three year promotion and touring cycle.
I always want to be touring.
There are nights when you can feel stale because you’ve fallen into a pattern by touring too much, but it’s easy to get out of it by deliberately getting in trouble and playing yourself into a corner to then see if you can get out of it.
Jay Z is one of the world’s preeminent touring artists.
Before I realized what was happening, everything blew up. I made ‘Animals’ when I was in high school, and literally, from that moment, I’ve been living a different life. I’ve been touring a lot, traveling a lot, doing great shows. I’ve been in the studio with my biggest idols.
I’m hopefully touring with Colin Baker next year in Perfect Strangers. I have performed with Sylvia Simms in poetry and music evenings. I would love to do those for the rest of my career – they are so fun and witty.
We are so excited to be touring and showing audiences the versatility of the cello.
My dream was to be the biggest comic with the biggest band, touring together.
As you get up in your thirties, the van touring is not a possibility anymore. We can’t all be Mike Watt.
I love touring. I love stand up. I love getting on a tour bus with my friends.
I’m a touring musician. I don’t watch the charts. I had the kind of success I’d hoped for. I won Grammys for a folk record, and that was magic.
Over the last couple of years, I’ve really worked toward balancing my life out more, having a little bit more time with friends, family and my boyfriend. There was a period of time when they were way down the list. It was all about music and touring and if everything fell by the wayside, so be it.
What I learned is that it’s very hard to have both a family life and a touring life simultaneously.
Even though the popularity and the fanbase is much much greater, and more people have heard about me through things like the Grammys and the Ivors and touring and word of mouth, it doesn’t reflect in the sales of the record and doesn’t go into my pocket.
If someone wants to shout at me and tell me I’m bowling badly, that’s fine. I may not agree but it’s fine. It’s part of the experience of being a touring cricketer.
It’s a funny thing… I started touring at nine or ten years old, and for the first ten, fifteen, almost twenty years of your career, you’re the youngest guy on stage and the youngest guy in the room.
After touring so much, I was looking for some peace. I found Morocco, and it was perfect. Everything I wanted to feel about peace, I found it there.
Touring is very grueling. It’s very taxing on the body and living out of your suitcase, going from city to city, night after night. It’s a tough job.
If I can still sing and still perform to my satisfaction, I don’t mind touring.
I have a really different touring life to most comedians because I go home every night to do the school run in the morning. So I’m not in hotels or living it up.
I cannot work on a Revamp album when I tour with Nightwish. And I cannot do any Nightwish stuff when I’m touring with Revamp.
I don’t like touring and it seemed to be getting on top of me in a big way.
When you’re in the same band as somebody, you’re seeing them almost more than 24 hours a day. You start to see an awful lot of the bad side ’cause touring is no easy thing.
When I stopped touring in the early ’80s for a few years, it was a mistake looking back. I lost touch with my audience in a way and I think that was a bad career move.
If I wasn’t touring, I wasn’t making money. When I got the MacArthur, I could get off that hamster wheel. It meant I didn’t have to do anything.
I could tell when I first started having sessions with stylists that my size was an issue. No one outright told me to lose weight but I knew it was a problem. I started to lose weight when I began touring.
If you get half a million, at a certain stage you probably will get 4 million people, if they are able to hear it. The touring thing is unbelievable. It really is amazing from what we did the last tour even to what we are doing now.
When we first started touring, we were going to these towns we’d never otherwise go to, never otherwise see, and that’s sort of why we like being in a band. But we started playing these bigger rooms and not even seeing the towns.
I love touring and I love being in the studio making music, so that’s where my passion lies.
When the Swing Lo Magellan touring wound up, it felt like the end of something for me, and I needed a break from touring. But really, the co-writing and producing I did after this gave me a different perspective on this whole thing. To me, that was like being a different spoke on the wheel.
I never, ever wanted to be the Rolling Stones. Bless their hearts, but I don’t necessarily want to go on doing the same old thing for the next 10, 20 years… I could see how easy it is to get into that rut, the whole touring mindset.
My best artist friend is definitely Jason Aldean. He and I really get along great and are really great friends. It’s fun to tour with a buddy and somebody that I just enjoy hanging out with. If we weren’t touring together, we’d be hunting in the off-season still and knocking around doing stuff, certainly.
I definitely enjoy my time by myself – and that’s kind of the weird thing about touring; you’re kind of constantly surrounded by people – but I actually do enjoy going out and doing things and being around people.
My touring band, they’re just brilliant, and all of them are learning ASL, so the wall of communication is breaking.
It was actually drumming that gave me the stamina to get into sports later. I started playing drums at 13, and when I got to the international touring level… I got interested in cross-country skiing, long-distance swimming, bicycling… things that require stamina, not finesse.
360 deals are the new things of the industry. It’s not about selling records; it’s about selling T-shirts, getting a piece of your publishing, getting a piece of your touring, and all these other kind of properties.
I love touring, it gives me the ability to see the world and meet some amazing people who are into my music.
The problem with touring isn’t the traveling and the shows, it’s the vegetal state you get into.
L.A. is a really good home base. I’ve grown up here, and so sometimes I have wanderlust even though I tour. You think it would be cured by touring, but sometimes I feel like I want to be somewhere else.
I started touring a little bit in 1973 in support of a record I made for an independent label. In 1975, when I signed with Warner Bros., where I remained happily ensconced for the next 24 years, my touring activity increased considerably.
I like to travel. I love touring, I love playing.
I really wanted to speak English because I started touring the world, and I wanted to communicate with people directly.
The worst thing about touring is the travel.
I’ll be like Bob Hope, touring when I’m 100.
My calendar was empty. Touring the way we did and having a schedule like we did institutionalizes you in a way where you don’t know anything else. I think I went through the darkest depression I’ve ever felt in my life.
I hate touring. But being onstage is one of the absolute best things I know in my life. And it is so good, it makes up for all the bad.
My teachers encouraged me to audition for some professional work during our summer vacation. I landed my first job. It was for the National Theatre Company’s Mimika Pantomime troupe. I ended up touring with them for the next two years.
Grupo Limite is always going to be a major highlight of my life. We worked so hard, sometimes touring for 10 months at a time.
The experiences of promoting my first album were really something; there is so much illusion in my environment (touring and pop music) that I wanted to clear away.
I’m bored of just being in a band and touring.
With music there’s so many limbs and facets. Video and touring and merchandise and all those little things require attention. They’re artist things but I tend to joke around too much with those things.
I love touring, more than anything. Doing the stage show is a more enjoyable process than TV. There are no safeguards but the payoff is the wow factor.
When I was three, I lived in Florida, and my mom took me to see the touring production of ‘Cats.’ And I was, like, absolutely silent – which for a 3-year-old never happens – and I turned to her and said, ‘I need to do this.’ That’s when I started my performer journey.
I guess actually playing on the records and touring is a great forced practice regimen for me. And you learn a lot playing with people.
Whereas for me, touring tends to be a very strange and isolating experience.
I learned so much about playing and touring being on the road and in the studio with Jeff, but I’d always played a lot of gigs in Seattle even prior to joining the Fusion.
Will Smith would not be Worldwide Will Smith if he had not insisted on going worldwide and touring with his films. You have to build that audience for people and allow for it to happen.
I felt like the last thing we did, ‘The Eternal,’ and the touring we did behind it was some of the strongest stuff we’d ever done, and the band was very much a vital entity.
Ninety percent of touring is a logistical maneuver, moving your body and everyone else’s from one city to the next. You’re like a piece of gear. Then you jump out of the box, get onstage, and play. That sounds cynical, but it sucks to move around so much.
I like touring; I live on the road, more or less.
Well, T Bone’s had a remarkable career as a producer since the time that we first worked together. He was dividing his time between recording and producing when we first met, and touring. We toured together and we were great friends.
Because of all the touring we do, our diets are all over the place.
I like a challenge. I need to feel passionate about something. If I’m not passionate about it, I can’t stand it. It has to feel real. DJ’ing, touring, charity work – anything.
There’s no platform for an unsigned music scene in the main cities – it’s all hyped acts or showcases behind closed doors. I read about artists that are doing it ‘the old-fashioned way’ and touring, as if that’s a unique thing to do – well, that should just be the way it is.
I love touring – I don’t do it as often as I should.
‘Loveless’ was a really big record for me. It was what was keeping me alive when I was still touring with Redd Kross.
I’m a full member of Cheap Trick in all respects. Solely as an accommodation to some of the band members, I reluctantly agreed to take a temporary hiatus from touring.
We love performing, we love touring.
Texas is really special in that we have our own music scene, our own music chart. It’s almost a genre on its own. It feels like you can make a great living just touring the state because it’s so big, but eventually, I wanted a new challenge.
When I was touring with Ozzy, you know, when I was with Manson, we toured with Ozzy, so many times, we did Ozzfest a thousand times, and, you know, it seems like I’m always playing with Ozzy in one way or another opening up.
We’re fabricating a state-of-the-art concessions system for our touring, so we can feed the people and give them everything they need without having to wait on it.
Touring is a rough thing. You don’t have any time to look around or stop and think if what you’re doing is making you happy. The more you tour, the better the band gets, and you get caught up in a lot more things than just traveling.
I’m kind of an obsessive person, and touring is repetitive in the best way.
I was burned out. I think I was just exhausted. It was a very intense five years. We didn’t stop. It was constant touring, constant writing, recording.
I have been touring since I got my first band in 1962, so there is no problem there. We are basically performing musicians, so that’s what we do.
We spent a year touring the world and it wasn’t until it was over that we truly appreciated the upside and downside of our success.
When I first started touring, we had a crappy van, and we would all share rooms. So for many years as a grown adult woman, I would share a bed with a bandmate, whether it would be Jimmy Tamborello from the Postal Service or Pierre De Reeder from Rilo Kiley, just a pillow barrier between us sleeping on the same bed.
The original idea of being anonymous – it was a great, naive idea on paper in 2008, not knowing to what degree we’d be touring or to what extent this was going to be a professional operation. That regimen is very hard to live by. What I hadn’t foreseen was the fans and their willingness to embrace that and play along.
I’ve always been in touring bands in some capacity.
I find myself more affected by music the more I do it. Particularly when you’re touring, and you’re in the bus, and you’re listening to loads of music. Life becomes far more dramatic, I guess – you’re never in the same place; you’re constantly meeting new people. You almost become more sensitized to music.
I love touring in the United States. It’s dramatically different wherever you go. North to south, you’re going from snow to palm trees.
Silicon Valley is actually a prime target for an ICBM missile strike. It occurred to me as I has touring Apple Park that if I was concerned about Americans’ safety and the symbol of America’s future I would think that those is Silicon Valley as the most vulnerable. That’s where you would be attacking the future economy.
The GTO is such an important car because it’s a racing car and a touring car and that’s pretty unusual.
I like touring. It’s like a school trip.
I saw Mercury Prize-winners Alt-J for the first time recently, touring their debut album ‘An Awesome Wave,’ and I’m still riding the high: they’re the most musically dynamic and exciting band to have poured tune into my lug holes live since Bellowhead.
After touring an album, you have this strange void that follows it, where you feel slightly displaced, like you’ve just finished with the circus and you’ve got to find a new job. You think, OK, what shall we do next.
I’m still learning how to be comfortable touring. I haven’t found that balance yet.
The period of time between when you’re done with a record and when you start touring is the worst period of a time in a musician’s life.
I’m most proud of my career as a touring comedian and musician. I love doing television, I love selling records, but when I’m at these venues with hundreds of people, and they’re all sitting listening to my music and my jokes, I feel like I could die that day, and I would be happy.
Touring is what you make it. I like to organise as much as possible myself.
We didn’t realize there were that many boy bands until we started touring in Europe. I don’t think we were ever affected by it since a lot of the groups in Europe didn’t really sing live, but we did and would perform a cappella as well.
Towards the end of touring ‘The North Borders’ I had a lot of personal stuff going on – family members who had died – and I was feeling displaced.
The juxtaposition between fishing and touring couldn’t be greater.
You know, when you really connect with the instrument and everything just comes out on an emotional level very naturally through your playing. That’s, you know, a great night. And I think the reason I love touring so much is you’re chasing that high around all the time, trying to have another good night.
Then we’re going to take a lot of time off because in the last three years we’ve been touring continuously.
I’m not the kind of person that can do the same thing over and over and over, so that’s why touring, playing in a different venue every night, in front of a different audience, is so rewarding, you know, because it always feels fresh.
The equipment you’ve got really dictates what you’re going to do. When I started touring, there were no monitors, so I had to take the sound from the hall, and of course it was on a delay, so I would sing, and then I would hear it back, but later. It was very weird.
Touring takes a lot of work, a lot of preparation.
When I’m not touring, I hardly ever leave my house. Part of it is I get to do what I’m most passionate about, which is work on music and make new songs.
I went to the University of Michigan for two years, and I auditioned for ‘Bring It On’ during my sophomore year, so I got to finish my sophomore year, and then I joined the cast – the touring cast.
My reality was feeling lonely while touring to predominately white countries where I sing to fans who don’t see me, don’t hear me, don’t cheer me on.
The first thing that comes to the mind when you are touring South Africa is bouncy wickets. But that is no surety of what kind of pitch you would get in the game.
The first time I went on stage as an adult was touring with the Johnny Cash Show. I’d sang as a child. But my grown-up initiation was as part of that band.
I was required by Capital to release one every six months and the fastest I could do with all my touring was every nine months, and it would spook me every time because I never had what I needed and I really didn’t want to do covers.
There hasn’t been one highlight that stands out… but touring and performing has been great.
In the crazy world of touring, if something gets stuck at customs, I can do a show with just my amp!
I always loved touring in Pentatonix; really the only reason it was tough was the pace and no breaks.
Touring is always important to me. It’s like a big IOU to my fans, because I know they are the reason I exist.
My life could have easily gone another way. But I had this one teacher who gave me direction and got me into performing. She got me into touring with an educational play called ‘The Inner Circle’ along with Pedro Zamora from MTV’s ‘The Real World.’
After touring the first album, we went into the studio and started making music that was influenced by all the freaky folk music we’d been listening to. Lots of Canterbury scene stuff from the 1960s and ’70s. Robert Wyatt, Soft Machine, Caravan, Gong.
I love touring. I can’t wait. Everything is just normal when you’re finally on tour. I think, for me, it’s my happiest thing; I love moving around, and I have friends and family all over the place. It’s kind of my time. It’s almost like home. It’s when I get to see everybody.
Touring is hard. It’s really hard on the singer, especially, because your body is your instrument and you have to be so good, it’s like boot camp out there; I can’t do anything – just sleep, sing and be very healthy.
We are literally touring the world, and people are listening to my music.
I’ve had this terrible stomach problem for years, and that has made touring difficult. People would see me sitting in the corner by myself looking sick and gloomy. The reason is that I was trying to fight against the stomach pain, trying to hold my food down. People looked me and assumed I was some kind of addict.
I am planning my one woman show. It will be a showcase of my life. It starts at the beginning and ends where I am today. It will have every single inch of my life – as much as you can get into an hour. I will be touring everywhere.
My folks met at the University of Oklahoma, in the theater department in the 1940s. They were married touring the country in ‘Cinderella’ and ‘Snow White.’ My mother was married in Cinderella’s costume; the dwarves were the best men.
Touring is not easy, as you always have a certain yearning for home no matter how beautiful the location you are in, but I have pushed myself to the limits and am certainly more aware of myself as a result.
Touring is an incredibly isolated situation. I don’t know how people tour for years on end. You find a lot of people who can’t stop touring, and it’s because they don’t know how to come back into life. It’s sort of unreal.
I’m just saying that at least for the foreseeable future there won’t be any more touring.
My favorite part of touring is when I see girls that I’ve been talking to on my site and then meeting them in person. I can’t believe how well the fans get along together. Everyone just seems to be really cool.
For me, this band and the music that I write and this touring thing that I do and playing in front of people, singing, and making a lot of noise on guitar – all that was more important than a lot of other things.
We’ll have these people hang out with us while we’re doing our touring, and talk to them and let them speak their piece to the world.
Mostly I’ve just been stealing little moments for myself in order to write – in the bathroom at a hotel, or just slipping away for a half an hour. Amidst all of the touring, life has been happening.
We toured that record for a year, which turned out to be the culmination of ten years of being constantly on the road. We were sick to death of touring.
I enjoyed the two years I was with Clannad. I enjoyed touring. We toured a lot in Europe.
After the 2009 ‘Cult Of Static’ touring cycle ended, I felt that, as a band, Static-X had accomplished everything we set out to accomplish, and now I could finally take the time to do my own thing and make a record that is completely my vision without compromising for anyone or anything.
That’s part and parcel of touring England. You have to be very street smart and on your game. If you’re not, the media and the ECB will have a field day with you.
A touring comic’s typical day roughly amounts to an hour of being laughed at and 20 minutes of being photographed. The other 22 hours and 40 minutes are spent in silence.
When I’m touring, I have to think of workouts that don’t require a gym.
Broadway is another monster. I’ve been touring since I was 12 years old and I love being on the road – one day you’re here, next day it’s snowing, and the next you are in a desert and it’s 110 degrees. So I guess I’m kind of used to the madness physically that you go to when you are an entertainer. But it’s been great.
A touring band is a family and a workplace at the same time, and you’re living with people you didn’t necessarily choose every day for up to a year.
I live in L.A. so I don’t get to see much theatre anymore. They have a lot of touring shows but it’s not like New York – I lived in New York for 15 years and you can walk out on the street and there’s something to see.
I knew from a very young age that I wanted to be in that world. But I also understood that being a touring musician meant that you’d be gone a lot and that was going to make other things a lot harder, like having a family.
I like touring extensively because I think the more hours you spend onstage, the more you know who you are onstage.
When touring I get to travel around with my best friends, do a show I love and I’m confident people will enjoy, and have all the adrenalin that comes with performing.
My favorite thing about touring is the new towns and new faces every day.
As children, my brother Baba and I would be taken to mushairas when my mother Shaukat Kaifi was touring with Prithvi Theatres, because we couldn’t afford a maid.
I claimed identity as Jewish musicians for political reasons, because most of us were touring in Germany and, at this time, twelve years ago, there was a strong resurgence of Nazism in the places we were touring and part of that was on the music scene.
I’ve been touring a lot, and I don’t always know how to get around. Google Maps on the iPhone is pretty helpful with that.
I wish records got made faster and looser with less thought in them, but since touring is so much more profitable than records, you spend so much time on the road that it’s hard to work on them. And the records get further and further apart.
Over a year’s time, I felt like I squeezed in five years of touring experience, which was a really huge help moving forward.
For me, the exhausting thing about touring is the sitting around, which is why working on my concert music is really great – and also seeing concerts and seeing friends and, whenever possible, getting out to see a museum.
I’ve never done stand-up; I came via small-scale touring theatre, through the Royal Shakespeare Company, the National Theatre, then I got employed on that as an actor who had a humorous sensibility.
What I really care about is writing… Some people feel about touring the way I feel about writing, which is, ‘Whoa, I can’t believe I get to do this as a job.’
Mental health is personal for our whole band. As touring musicians, self-care can quickly become make it or break it on the road.
When I’m not touring, I really don’t leave the house.
Hopefully after a year or two of touring around eventually we’ll just be The Blanks. We do pretty much everything we do on ‘Scrubs’ in our show, but it’s not presented as Ted’s Band.
I didn’t know what to expect when we first started touring behind ‘Southeastern’ because you don’t want to lull anybody to sleep or lose their attention. But it’s really been incredible how the crowds seem to be just as excited for the slow, sad songs as they are for the old rockers.
