We’re very excited to let everyone know our new record is out in digital form now. The full CD will be out in February, but you can get it now from iTunes or the likes. There are 11 new songs and two bonus tracks that you won’t be able to get anywhere else.
We’re really proud of this record and we think it’s a great listen from front to back. Check it out and let us know what you think. Hope you enjoy!
Two months on the road does a lot of weird stuff to a person. You find yourself having trouble to stay connected with your family, friends and loved-ones while on the road. You see your kids, nephews and nieces grow up while you are gone. You miss out on a lot. And you kinda come home to normal life and don’t know what to do yourself. You keep trying to find an XLR to plug in, wonder what time load-in or sound check is and realize you were getting kinda used to that overly small bunk bed on the bus. Kinda weird. I know. But it’s the truth!
All I can say, is that we all left the last date of the “We Need Each Other” tour with a lump in our throats and a longing to have that same friendship on the road as we came to know with Sanctus and the Tenth Ave guys. Those guys are the real deal. Please support their music— go buy their records, check out their shows. They are amazing guys. We love to see great bands that are doing genuinely good art with hearts for Christ succeed and do well.
We’re going to enjoy our next few weeks home. We’re actually renting our bus, sound and lights out to David Phelps for his Christmas tour, so we’ll have a quick trip to Nashville for tour rehearsals for him and then head home.
We’ll be letting you know how the home life is going over the next few weeks. We’ll have a couple cool shows coming up. One in our home town with our old friends Remedy Drive. Please check out their new record! Also, we’ll have a really cool opportunity to share our message with some inmates at a prison here in Nebraska with an acoustic performance for them in early December.
Hope you all are doing well. Remember to check out our new single, it just got added to rotation on KLOVE and Air1 and several other stations. Much love to you all!
Hey peeps. Just wanted to say hey and that we are still alive despite our quiet nature on the blog this past week. We had an amazing time these past few weeks on tour. We got to drive all the way through Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, California, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana and the list goes on! So many miles on the old bus. Thank God we were safe the whole time and we had no break downs going coast to coast on this tour! Yeah! My ultimate highlight though was having my fiancé fly out to meet us for the show in Vegas and then ride the bus with up the California coast. Great memories for us for the rest of our lives.
But now we approach the home stretch of “We Need Each Other” the Tour. Three more big shows in Michigan coming up. We’ll be leaving Wednesday for those, should be a nice fun trip.
MOST IMPORTANTLY, VOTA says VOTE!!!!! All of ya’ll have to get out an vote tomorrow if you are of the voting age.
See you again soon on da blog. =)
Well, we arrived in California today, It is my first time here. I have never been much of a west coast traveller. But it is nice here. I’m listening to the new Copeland record (You Are My Sunshine) as I type this. What an astonishing voice. This record will be on my rotation for quite a while I think.
We’ve had a few days off here and there over the last 10 days or so. Which has been great. We got to watch a movie, shop, visit relatives, all sorts of good things. Last night we went “camping” in Joshua Tree national park. The put apostrophe’s around camping because we never go anywhere without the bus, so we always have our beds with us. It was a really gorgeous evening. Scott took some pictures which we will post here on flickr soon. I also shot some video of a few of us climbing around the camp site. I’ll probably edit it up and post on you tube real soon.
Wow, what a last few days. Lots of driving, lots of hard work, but some really great shows. We have some photos from our show at Club 3 Degrees in Minneapolis. So check out the Vota Flickr account to view them.
We’re going to be home for a little over a week to recharge a little bit, spend some time with our familes and just get some rest. I got to see my fiancé today for the first time in about two weeks, so that was very therapeutic. It’s easy for me to get use to the hectic life of the road because of the busyness and sleeplessness. Once I get home, things kind of slow down for a bit when I see Riki (my fiancé) or hang with my family. It’s so helpful to return to a homebase and get you back to your foundation in life.
Also, we want to encourage any of our voting age fans out there that have not been able to check out some of the latest on the presidential race to take some time to educate yourself about the candidates and watch the latest debate. Check out this video post by C-SPAN to watch it for free online:
VOTA does not want to sway your opinion either way towards a specific candidate, all we want to do is to make sure that our fans understand how crucial this next election is to the future of the US and the world. From gas prices, to the economy, to terrorism, to the US’ reputation with the world… a lot of weight falls on the shoulders of these candidates to lead the world with wisdom and integrity. Check it out. Be educated. Be informed.
So as Scott said, the bus was in the shop. Hence my suprise that morning when I woke up. I peeked out the window of the bus to see where we were, expecting some form of greenery. I discovered what Andrew (the sound engineer) called a forest of Prevost buses. Also we were 6 feet off the ground, which was a little shocking. Since it was a day off and we didn’t have a gig, we got to just hang out and chill for once. Bryan continually tried to learn how to fly his new remote control helicopter (with meager success). Since everyone of us loves Indian food, we made a deal with Andrew that we’d eat Burger King at noon in exchange for fine Indian dining in the evening. After a late dinner we went to our hotel. the Breaker hotel is an ocean side luxury hotel on the coast of NJ. It was dark, but I was still so excited to see the ocean again that Case and I ran to the waters edge in the dark just to hear, smell, and touch the water.
We slept about 4 hours and woke up super early for a morning assembly at Wall Highschool. Let me make “super early” clear, we actually played a rock show at 7:45 AM!!! There just ain’t enough coffee in the whole world to compensate for that hour. the second assembly was at 9:30, after which we went back to the beach for a little nap. Our show that night went well, although our bus was still being worked on, so we wound up with all our gear out on the sidewalk, waiting for an hour. We all gathered around my macbook and watched The Office, so it was alright.
Now it is 10:30 AM the next day, I have just awoke and the bus has been rolling all night. We are headed to Chicago to pick up Sanctus Real and resume the “We Need Each Other Tour”.
So ever since we bought this fancy bus, I find myself doing a few things much more frequently… 1) saying bad words, 2) ruining clothes with grease stains and 3) hanging out at diesel shops talking with mechanics about the bus. Basically, like 5% of my job for this band is actually playing on stage and maybe 90% of my job is working on the bus and the other 5% is random stuff like talking to people, tracking merch orders, repairing lights and eating cereal. It’s crazy, I know. It’s my life. =)
The VOTA Bus.
Anyway, we’re in Jersey at one of six Prevost bus shops in the world. Prevost is like the Ferrari of buses. The thing is though, buses are very expensive to maintain, so sometimes they don’t get maintained. For instance our bus, the previous owners—who will remain nameless— not so saavy when it comes to taking care of a bus. So we’re playing catch up. We’re almost to the end of the list from the aftermath of the previous owners. Anyway, we should be back and on the road for our 180 Tour event tomorrow in Wall, New Jersey.
PS- a cool little tidbit, the ONE Campaign tour bus is next to us in the shop here. Check out the photo.
The One Campaign Bus
What can I say? The last couple of shows have been amazing! Sold-out crowds in Bangor, ME and Souderton, PA! We’ve never been to Maine before, but it was really beautiful and the fact that the show was awesome made it that much better. Souderton really surprised me, apparently Sanctus has never played in Souderton before, but it totally took us by surprise when we heard that the show was close to sold-out at 1,400 people. Crazy! Anyway, the shows were very cool and it was so sweet to have such great volunteers every night too. Each night the entire production was half way torn down by the time we got done with autographs. You volunteers rule! If you helped us out, thank you so much! Here are a couple shots from the shows. More photos are posted on the Vota band Flickr.
Here we are about two weeks into the tour. WOW. This is sooooo much work, but it’s a lot of fun hanging with all of these guys on tour. A really awesome group. This is almost the hardest we’ve ever worked on tour next to doing 2-3 school assemblies in one day. These shows have been a ton of fun, the turnouts have been great and the production has been good every night. Today we’re playing the Oklahoma State Fair so we’ll be glutting ourselves on corn dogs, turkey legs and funnel cakes all day. I heard some of my guys and Sanctus talking about getting character sketching done of all the guys on the tour. I think a old western photo of VOTA would be in order. Anyway, thinks are great, the bus has been running pretty much fine. We are having a little trouble with some of the air-ride so I’m taking it into the shop when we get home in the morning. We’ll keep trucking though! We’ll have some photos from the shows up soon. Check ‘em out!
This morning I woke up in another parking lot. It appears to be a mall, which is exciting because I need to buy some socks! Yesterday we had a day off while the Sanctus boys played a show for the T.V. series Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. Case chilled with some family that lives in the area and the rest of us went out to find a movie theatre. Just inside the theater there was a restaurant where we went to kill time. Which turned out great because we found out that Sonya (an employee of the restaurant) had been practicing her guitar hero III chops on the T.V. in there. This discovery led to a series of vicious two player guitar battles between all of us while we waited for our movie. Anyway, back to breakfast, hope to see you soon!
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