Photo credit Jacq Justice
Tell us about your tour vehicle.
Nowadays we rent our tour vehicles. Many years back, after the loss of our beloved Ford e-350 van, PAC0, we didn’t think we could love again in that kind of way. Renting is super convenient, shoutout to Bandago. No one is left with a wrecked van to clean after tour, or mechanical upkeep to deal with. When they break down (or you get in an accident), they bring a fresh one, and tour rolls on. We’ve gotten new vans delivered in the Lower East Side of NYC, central TX, etc. Never missed a show because of it.
How do you eat cheaply and/or healthy while on tour?
This is a wide wide spectrum. We try to do the best we can when we have control of the situation – smoothies in the morning, salads and veggie bowls where possible for lunch, steak/fish/veggies for dinner. We also have been lucky to have people cook for us, or treat us to some of the finest dining experiences of our lives on tour. Once-in-a-lifetime Chef’s table type stuff. But on the flip side, we love a dirty diner and are no strangers to late-night Dominos either. Sometimes the only option for eating in a day is gas-station chicken tenders, so you do what you must to keep going!
How many strings do you break in a typical year? How much does it cost to replace them?
I try to replace them before the break! I also try not to think of those sunk-costs of tour life. Definitely more than I’ve spent on gas station tendies this year…
Where do you rehearse?
We don’t all live in the same place anymore so our rehearsal spaces are ever-changing depending on tour schedule. The latest one a few weeks back was amazing – the Tybee Arts Association. It was a very small local theater on Tybee Island on the Georgia coast, where they put on very local productions of plays and musicals. They were rehearsing in the back while we were there. On our breaks, we were treated to a group local island older folks practicing scenes, and rehearsing songs. The director was pretty tough too, “Wrong! Stop!” Not going to lie though: they were pretty majestic.
What was the title and a sample lyric from the first song that you wrote?
I did a project on blues music in middle school and wrote a song about a lonely, friendly monster that everyone was scared of, but he just wanted to be friends. Classic tale. I don’t recall the title or any of the lyrics but I still remember the visual of the monster character – loosely based off Howie Mandel’s character from Little Monsters.
Describe your first gig.
The timeline is a little fuzzy for me. My first gig that wasn’t a school talent show was just after highschool, either 1) playing with some older kids’ band, 8-point Buck, opening up for the great Glossary at Star Bar in Atlanta. Hanging out backstage in a storied dive bar venue at 18 years old really blew my mind. Or it was 2) getting asked to put together a band to open up for a touring act coming through Athens – that was the summer before college started. We named our band The Shady Boys and got to play for the first of countless times at the legendary Tasty World which became a home-base for us in the years to come. It was the same place we played one of our first Futurebirds show (which might’ve been the actual question here), opening up for a new up-and-coming band, Dr Dog. The room energy was awesome and wild. “Guys, we should keep doing this for a little bit!”
What was your last day job? What was your favorite day job?
Legal job? It’s a sea of part-time odds-n-ends to fill the gaps. One of the last ones was either seasonally helping out at a Candy Store in Nashville, Bang Candy, or being a sandwich artist at the deli counter of the local bar, Duke’s. Both those were pretty great, run by awesome folks.
How has your music-related income changed over the past 5-10 years? What do you expect it to look like 5-10 years from now?
We’re super grateful to be able to make a life of playing music for a living, especially amidst a seemingly ever-shrinking ability for smaller musicians to make a sustainable career out of it. We’re able to do that through our amazing community of fans. It’s definitely a shifting landscape with giant corps owning more and more small clubs and venues, shrinking deals and rising overhead costs. I don’t think that’s wholly unique to the music business these days though. We try and find the nooks and crannies still unoccupied by those forces when we can, and they do still exist. There’s a lot of awesome folks doing things for the right reasons, and for the love of the game. We know it’s no small feat for people to even come out to a show these days with the cost of everything involved, so we never take it for granted when folks show up!
Who knows about the next 5-10. Hopefully we’ll all be living on private beaches somewhere. The whole community. If you’ve ever bought a ticket to a Futurebirds show, you get a private beach. That’s a promise.
What one thing do you know now that you had wished you knew when you started your career in music?
Maybe what a 401k is? We are real slow-learners in general. There are tons of things on the ‘professional’ side we probably could have gotten the hang of sooner, but that might’ve also watered-down other aspects of the whole thing. You just have to trust the process.