VOTA Road Journal

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!

So here we are, 3 days in to the tour. So far so good. It’s been great to meet new people, I’ve been trying to learn all the names, but it’s a pretty big crew on this tour. We are working really hard on this tour as VOTA. It’s not just playing a show, but we are setting up and tearing down the sound system and lights as well. Not to mention driving the bus through the night. It feels good to work hard though.

The first two shows have been great, Sanctus has some great fans in their home state. We have 25 minutes to introduce ourselves to the crowd each night which translates to about 7 songs. Of our 7 songs, only one is off the old record, everything else is fresh and new. Now that the new record is done it’s great to watch people getting into the new music. Its a little bit of a switch since I am used to longer sets where there’s more time for talking with the audience. But I’m looking forward to traveling the country with these bands and meeting new people and playing our new songs.

The VOTA crew is once again on the road. We are on our way to Ohio currently for a tour rehearsal with Sanctus Real and Tenth Avenue North. We left last night about 11 P.M. after some last minute work on our concert lights. It feels good to be out again after a few weeks home (with the exception of LifeLight Festival). Good to hang out with the dudes again. Last night Bryan fashioned a shoe cubby into a bunk shelf with the aid of a few very long wood screws. I pray for the safety of those who inhabit the bunk on top of his.

LifeLight was incredible. Case and I got a chance to go rock climb in the palisades in the morning before our shows. We had one close call when one of our climbers’ harness loop ripped during a fall. Luckily we had the foresight to tie a second protection in. phew… Well, that’s enough for catch up, time to get back to season one of The Office!

Hope to see you out on the road!

So the band recently returned from Salina, Kansas where we spent the week with 420 ish Junior High and High School kids, er, young adults, at the fabulous Super Summer Kansas!  We blobbed, we rock climbed, we rappelled, we zip-lined, we ate cafeteria food, we heard from God, we cleaned up after our messes, we worshipped!  What a week.  Our role there as VOTA was to lead students in the worship of God— no small task!  They were far better at it than ourselves, so we really followed them.  One of the highlights for us was seeing many students trust in Jesus Christ for the first time.

To think that heaven was rejoicing in resounding noise and rejoiceable sounds!  Hey, that sounds like a good title for our next record…. Rejoiceable Sounds.  Or, maybe Rejoiceable Rejoicing…  too repetitive.  So regardless, we had a very nice time and met many new friends in Salina, Kansas and from all over Kansas and Nebraska for that matter.  We hope to see them again next year!  The Blob awaits!!!