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.
