2010 AP Tour Blizzard

My lovely WONKA enthusiasts! I couldn’t be happier to be writing you this third blog installment from the AP Tour! Why so happy you ask? Well, our caravan of three buses and two vans with trailers just finally made it through the craziest storm that I have toured through in the last decade!

We began our day in Salt Lake City just like any other day. We got our gear inside, and I checked in our 1,000-pound shipment of delicious WONKA candy, and so on and so forth. After an hour or two, I went back outside to get changed for the show and to my great surprise it was pouring rain. And I’m talking like sideways, sting your face, all over the place rain. Within another hour it was hailing the size of golf balls, which was soon replaced by snowfall.

Now let me pause for a moment and say that, since I’m from Los Angeles, snow is novel and fun for the first 15 minutes or so. We ran around, caught snowflakes on our tongues and had a snowball fight. After the initial awesomeness wore off it became quite clear that not only would we need to push everyone’s set times up to finish the show early so kids could get safely home, but that we also might not make it to the show in Denver the next day : / boo!

It was decided that the two bands with vans and trailers, The Summer Set and Every Avenue, would stay behind as the roads were much too dangerous. We put each band’s singer and one guitar player on our buses so they could play acoustic shows the next day and headed out. Our three buses crawled their way through the pass and we eventually made it to Denver the next day around 4pm… a drive that normally takes nine hours took us 17!

I’m glad to report that after 48 hours all of the tour caught up to each other and we made it safely to Des Moines, IA today! Thanks to all you guys and gals who helped us along the way, showed up early in the snow to line up and made the last few shows so much fun that we all remembered why we tour and go through storms and all other sorts of madness to make it to your city! Hugs and SweetTARTS! X0

A Day in the Life…

So we are about a week and a half into the AP Tour, and I thought it’d be fun to fill you in on a little bit of the touring world that most people neeeevvver ever see… how one lives full time on a tour bus and sleeps in a bed that travels down the highway at 65 miles per hour.

A lot of people think the touring life is so very sweet, and because of WONKA, this tour just happens to be! Nope, no fancy hotel rooms for us, my home for the next two months is a standard band bus… about the same size as a Greyhound bus, but completely gutted and redesigned on the inside!

When you first walk onto the bus you see the driver’s seat and a curtain you have to pass through that leads to the front lounge, aka “Hugs&Hangs Deluxe Zone.” We’ve got two couches, a small table, kitchen sink, microwave, and one of those tiny refrigerators some of you have in your dorms at college J. After that, you hit the bunk galley, which is separated by a sliding door on either side, called the “Sleepy-Time Nation” area. Now when I say ‘bunk’ you probably think of the bunk bed you and your sibling had in elementary school… well there’s a little twist here, instead of two beds high, ours sleep three high! And let me tell you, I have a top bunk on this tour, and I feel like a professional rock climber every time I successfully make it into bed!

The last small space in the very back of the bus is, well, the back lounge. Just a small table with a bench seat and connected couch, but we’ve turned it into our mobile office. Laptops and printers all over the place with everyone working on everything from daysheets for the next show, to WONKA candy dropships, to creating/writing new songs in Logic for upcoming albums!

And yes, we work all day while our bus driver sleeps all day. At the end of the day, we climb into our bunks to fall asleep and our driver Johnny sets out on the highway to take us to our next show… possibly your city! Check out the video that I made to see for yourself. See ya soon, WONKAnation!