First tour update!

Hey y’all! The entire team is safe on our “mini nightliner” and currently driving through Denmark towards our first show in cologne. First of many patreon tour updates here, with future ones coming in video form. We have had a hectic couple of days, and I want to give you the general breakdown:

1/23: our first rehearsal/tech day with the full band.

-we run errands to guitar center, Best Buy, Lowe’s, fed ex office and back to Best Buy. Grabbing instrument cables, patch cables, stuff to make more rune necklaces, Finnish tax paperwork, and European wall plug converters for our bunks.

-i frantically finish the orchestration for our intro, which is a bit of new music that I demanded we play because I wanted to be difficult.

-I frantically finish as many rune necklaces for merch as I can.

-donny puts all our guitars through a spa day.

-I chip away ice from our basement stairs with an axe.

-we load gear down the now ice-free basement stairs

-we test all of our equipment for rehearsal - wireless in ear packs, wireless router, cables, mics - basically everything we need to audio for the show.

-we have actual rehearsal + dialing in the in-ear mixes + fixing issues with guitar tone and wireless guitar equipment.

-we do some frantic letter writing and envelope sealing for YALL!

1/24: second rehearsal and departure day

-we have second rehearsal which is the last chance to address anything tone or performance related before tour.

-we load gear back upstairs for pre-pack organization

-we run to target for a luggage scale

-gear pack and weight distribution (no one piece of gear can be over 50lbs). Possibly the most time/labor intensive of all these processes, involving unscrewing one item at a time from the racks, weighing it, swearing a lot, and repeat.

-personal items and clothing pack

-all of it goes into 3 vehicles, and we are driven by 3 lovely supportive women (thanks Casey, Becky, and Ramla!) to the Asheville airport.

-with some negotiating at the counter and my freshly made laminated media pass we save us a lot of money on 12 checked bags.

-I do lots of of praying to many gods of travel that our equipment makes it to cologne and is not lost or destroyed (both have happened in the past).

-our first flight is delayed about 2 hours, meaning we just have enough time to grab a bite in Charlotte before rushing onto our flight to london.

1/25: travel day

-not sure exactly how long the London flight is, but I watched The Creator and A Haunting in Venice in between minor bouts of sleep.

-we arrive in London and link up with Jaska our FOH + TM (FOH is front of house audio, he’s mixing us for the audience. TM is tour manager, he is the primary point of contact between venue crews, avatar’s crew, and us) and Bria our Small Merch Person.

-we have no issues with the flight to Gothenburg, just more micro doses of sleep.

-we get through passport control with no issues

-we miraculously get all of our equipment with no issues. My border control agent is a fan of soilwork.

-we link up with the tour vehicle and our driver Mateusz. It is much nicer than I had expected. We have 6 seats, a mini fridge, a bathroom we can pee in, and a sink that is currently frozen. We have 9 bunks, stacked in 3s. Mateusz has bottom rear bunk. I’ve got top passenger side.

That basically brings us to now! We have a ferry to catch, and expect to be in cologne around 8 or 9 am. It has gone surprisingly smoothly so far, and in no small part thanks to y’all.

Hope you’ve enjoyed reading, I’ll have some video for you soon. We’ll keep you updated on how the tour goes, but for now I’m going back to sleep.

TMHC FOREVER!