Well, at least I’m excited for them…so hopefully you will be too!

Amidst not having anything to do the other night, I went searching around to see who was on tour–because seeing music live is just that amazing that I’m willing to shell out my cash to see the magic in action.

Here are the results of my late-night live-music search:

Saves the Day - Acoustic Tour

Last time I saw these guys was Warped ‘06…it was good times, I took a picture of Chris with my phone, it was my phone’s background for a bit. I know, I live an exciting life. The final show of the tour at the Troub WILL be fun. I promise! So LA peeps, get tickets soon–THEY WILL SELL OUT.

October 1 – San Francisco, CA @ Bottom of the Hill
October 2 – Anaheim, CA @ Chain Reaction
October 4 – Salt Lake City, UT @ Kilby Court
October 5 – Denver, CO @ Marquis Theatre
October 6 – Lawrence, KS @ Jackpot Music Hall
October 7 – Chicago, IL @ Subterranean
October 9 – Detroit, MI @ Shelter
October 10 – Cleveland, OH @ Grog Shop
October 11 – Pittsburgh, PA @ Diesel
October 12 – Richmond, VA @ Alley Katz
October 13 – Hoboken, NJ @ Maxwell’s
October 14 – Washington, DC @ Rock N Roll Hotel
October 16 – Philadelphia, PA @ North Star
October 17 – Albany, NY @ Valentine’s
October 18 – Allston, MA @ The ICC
October 19 – Rochester, NY @ Water Street Music Hall
October 22 – Atlanta, GA @ Loft
October 23 – Orlando, FL @ The Social
October 25 – Austin, TX @ Emo’s Jr
October 26 – Houston, TX @ Java Jazz
October 28 – Tempe, AZ @ The Sets
October 29 – Los Angeles, CA @ Troubadour

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Circa Survive

FUCK YES. That’s what I have to say about this tour. Circa Survive is by and far my favorite band and if, like me, you missed them on Warped this year, then here’s your chance to make up for it. Bay area peeps–I’ll see you at Slim’s on Nov. 11. Look for me, I’ll be the long-haired girl drinking a gin and tonic and signing every word to every song.

Oct 10: Worcester, MA @ The Palladium
Oct 11: Sayreville, NJ @ Starland Ballroom
Oct 12: New York, NY @ Nokia Theatre
Oct 13: Allentown, PA @ Crocodile Cafe
Oct 14: Philadelphia, PA @ Trocadero Theatre
Oct 16: Washington, DC @ 9:30 Club
Oct 17: Buffalo, NY @ Club Infinity
Oct 18: Clifton Park, NJ @ Northern Lights
Oct 19: Lancaster, PA @ Chameleon Club
Oct 20: Richmond, VA @ Canal Club
Oct 21: Charlotte, NC @ Tremont Music Hall
Oct 23: Jacksonville, FL @ Fuel
Oct 24: St. Petersburg, FL @ State Theatre
Oct 25: Ft. Lauderdale, FL @ Culture Room
Oct 26: Orlando, FL @ The Club at Firestone
Oct 27: Atlanta, GA @ Center Stage
Oct 28: New Orleans @ Voodoo Music Festival
Oct 30: Houston, TX @ Warehouse Live
Oct 31: San Antonio, TX @ White Rabbit
Nov 1: Dallas, TX @ The Palladium Ballroom
Nov 3: Tempe, AZ @ Marquee Theatre
Nov 4: San Diego, CA @ The Soma
Nov 6: Las Vegas, NV @ The Joint
Nov 8: Los Angeles, CA @ Mayan Theatre
Nov 9: Pomona, CA @ Glasshouse
Nov 10: Pomona, CA @ Glasshouse
Nov 11: San Francisco, CA @ Slims
Nov 13: Portland, OR @ Hawthorne Theatre
Nov 14: Seattle, WA @ The Showbox
Nov 16: Salt Lake City, UT @ Avalon Theatre
Nov 17: Denver, CO @ Bluebird Cafe
Nov 18: Lawrence, KS @ Granada Theatre
Nov 20: Omaha, NE @ Sokol Underground
Nov 21: St. Paul, MN @ Station 4
Nov 23: Royal Oak, MI @ Royal Oak Music Theatre
Nov 24: Chicago, IL @ Metro
Nov 25: Cleveland, OH @ Agora Ballroom

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Cold War Kids

So it’s official, the CWK tour with the White Stripes has in fact been canceled. HAHA! I wanted to get tickets to that, but they were sold out…so lucky I didn’t! They were going for like $200 - $300 on eBay and Craigs List…sucks for those people who bought them off there. Nevertheless, the ‘Kids did schedule a small tour. I’m stoked. I bought tickets the minute they went on sale…I didn’t want to take any chances–these tickets sell out as if they were giving them away. So go to Ticketmaster.com and order yours quick! Once again, LA peeps, I’ll see you at the Wiltern on Nov. 23–woohoo!!

Nov 17: San Francisco, CA @ Warfield Theatre
Nov 23: Los Angeles, CA @ Wiltern Theatre
Nov 27 & 28: Washington, DC @ 9:30 Club
Nov 29: Philadelphia, PA @ Theatre of the Living Arts
Nov 30 & Dec 1: New York, NY @ Webster Hall
Dec 4: Boston, MA @ The Roxy
Dec 11: Boulder, CO @ Boulder Theater

Synthesis Editorial Director Daniel Taylor is out on the road as part of the Tooth and Nail Acoustic Tour, and will be blogging about his travels

OK: Heading north out of Dallas we made good time to Oklahoma, where every small town advertised itself as the “Hometown of So-and-So.” We stopped for gas in the “Hometown of NFL Hall of Famer Troy Aikman,” a forlorn, forgotten slab of a town. The woman at the counter wore her Indian grimace solemnly, an ancient look. I wanted to know her entire life: to what tribe did she belong? From what untold suffering was she descended? Her stern countenance inferred a million spectacular secrets of the earth, all there for the taking. Of course I didn’t ask. No one ever asks. We impose unquestioning privacy on one another and live out our sad secret lives of quiet desperation, hurrying ourselves stealthily to our hopeful graves. I bought a bottle of Evian and got back on the road.

MO: Joplin, Missouri is the type of town you never hear about unless you have to go there, and there’s really no reason you’d ever have to go there. Nevertheless, some hundred thousand or so people ARE there, living a peculiar form of sub-urban anonymity. It’s as if 70 separate small towns grew into each other over time, sprawling outward instead of upward until there was no other choice but to unite under a common flag, combining their dismal aspects into one grand, shared sorrow. The main drag conducted us into the crumbling epicenter of town where we played wiffle ball in front of a moldy Laundromat. The locals were unimpressed but we didn’t care. The girls there were ugly anyway.

IA: The next day we were back in Des Moines, passing the same cornfields we had passed three weeks earlier on our way East to Indiana. Or were they the same? Blowing by at 80 mph, the endless sea of sprouting ears on both sides of the highway certainly seemed like so many green sculptures, permanent an unchanged from time immemorial. But the reality was that not a one of those infinite stalks had avoided change, avoided aging, avoided inching closer to its own hopeful grave during those three weeks. A million corn tragedies and corn victories had been committed to posterity in those fields, visible if only one were to LOOK. And moreover, hadn’t I changed in the interim as well? Hadn’t everything changed? Then again, maybe nothing had changed. Maybe change was just an illusion anyway. Maybe everything, the corn, the road, the whole sickening lot of life was just an illusion. I spent some time trying to figure out which of those two possibilities I would prefer. We played that night in a heavy metal bar in Downtown Des Moines under the shadow of a few pathetic skyscrapers. Ever since Slipknot everything in Des Moines is metal, metal, metal, or at least that’s what some kid told me. Jack Kerouac once wrote that the “prettiest girls in the world live in Des Moines” but I didn’t really see any evidence of that. Maybe all that metal drove them out. Who knows.

MN: Minneapolis is by far the grandest city middle America has to offer, and as far as my particular criteria are concerned, a more pleasant metropolis could scarcely be found on either coast for that matter. We arrived at sunrise, and while the others slept I took it upon myself to make an exhaustive survey of the urban center. Office workers ducked out of their glimmering high rises for their morning smokes in seemingly ridiculous droves. I ate a tremendous breakfast of waffles and eggs at the Marquette Hotel and blew a whole week’s food money. Everywhere I looked were the beatest of characters: bike messengers in vintage dresses and black leggings, Midwest hip-hop kids bopping along to their personal boombips, and best of all, countless Muslim women, of what looked to be a North African persuasion, bedecked in full burkhas and luscious lipstick. They scurried along and clicked their tongues to each other in hushed tones, veiling their words as they did their faces. Later at the Mall of America, trying on some jeans in the H&M dressing room, I encountered a group of these women, holding vigil outside a stall while one of their ranks tried on her own selections. Perhaps confused as to the unisex nature of the facility, the occupant emerged free of not just her headdress, but the better half of her clothing. I stared, slack jawed at this uncovered jewel of the Nile as her friends tittered nervously. She met my gaze and flashed a cat eyed smile. I smiled back and that was that. The jeans didn’t really fit but I bought them anyway. I hurried back out to dig Minneapolis while I had the chance.

Every day the world groaned to turn and we were making our appalling studies of the night

Synthesis Editorial Director Daniel Taylor is out on the road as part of the Tooth and Nail Acoustic Tour, and will be blogging about his travels

Frontier: It struck me somewhere in the middle of Texas, on the 35 heading towards that infernal oasis known as San Antonio, that I had officially been away from the warm bosom of the Chico/Willows area for longer than I had ever been before. And I do mean EVER. Perhaps that just goes to show how limited my prior adventures on this earth have been. But it was a milestone nonetheless, one that was marked by no small amount of anxiousness on my part. What would happen now? Would I implode? Would I suddenly go insane and drive the van off the edge of one of those absurdly skyscraping Texas turnpike overpasses, a variety of roadway if not unique to the state, then most certainly perfected therein? Who knows? I was practically beside myself with fear. And loathing. And I wasn’t even in Las Vegas.

Get in the Van: Adding to my general state of anxiety were the litany of annoyances and random pitfalls encumbering my journey. Foremost among these was the vessel itself. Though a vehicle of the hardiest and most expansive build, our tour van was nevertheless an apartment ill-suited to the purpose of housing five grown men and their assorted belongings for a month’s time, not to mention an entire band’s worth of musical equipment. Were we to have two such vans for a trip half the length, things would have been tough but manageable. We nevertheless endeavored to make the best of the situation at hand, scientifically arranging and angling every item to achieve maximum usage of the space available. After accomplishing this to our satisfaction, we set out on the initial leg of our journey. However, a night of sleeping in various yogic-like positions, legs and arms and heads splayed about at fantastic angles like a slumbering Cirque du Soliel troupe, duly motivated us to arrange and rearrange until finally we had freed ourselves enough space for four people to lay prone, one on the floor and three on the seats. This arrangement left only one odd man out, whose task it was to either drive or find his own sleeping arrangement outside of the van. Since the latter was often less than appetizing, on most nights while all else tried their best to sleep, one unlucky soul was left to man the helm, navigating through the night. This also served to exacerbate my condition, as the perpetual motion of my erstwhile bed rendered it less than agreeable to slumbering. What sleep I did find was typically haunted by perturbing dreams doubtlessly inspired by the less than ideal conditions, the wind shrieking through open windows (as we were without air-conditioning), the stopping and starting and turning typically involved in the act of driving, and not least of all, the close quarters of my companions, who though more accomplished in the art of “sleeping through it” were nevertheless still prone to incessant stirrings, lending the interior of our dear old van the air of an oversized hamster cage with wheels, hurtling through the blithe air.

Show is the Rainbow: I do believe that the only thing that kept me, and is keeping me still, from coming completely unglued was the salvation found in our nightly performances. Few things cheer the mood of that unabashed variety of narcissist known as a “musician” more than the eyes of a few hundred people pointed directly at his person. Ah the magic of music! No matter what condition the day’s, and often previous night’s, journey had rendered us—unrested, unshowered, unchanged, soiled and otherwise unkempt—a quick visit to the stage proffered to the bearded lot of more invigoration and handsomeness of aspect than any amount of grooming and primping could have ever hoped to accomplish. Who needs sleep when there’s rock n roll? And coffee?

Westward Ho: There is also some amount of solace to be found in the fact that, having reached the easternmost end of our journey at Florida, we’ve now plotted a zig-zagging return course, heading west. As anxious as I am to return home to open arms and motionless beds and slow food and all the trimmings of everyday life, I know that, like all things in life, as soon as I’m finally free from this musical servitude I’ll only wish to have it back, if only to have something to complain about. It seems the plight of man, to be happy only through comparative unhappiness! And I’m just a man. In a van. Looking for a Starbucks.