The Tour Begins Now!
After months of planning and prepping, the day of the tour has arrived. There are emotions aplenty.
Today, June 5, 2024 marks the official start of my Sheddio On The Road Tour. I first began working on this tour in October of 2023. For more than seven months, I have been booking, marketing, and preparing for these shows. During that time there were moments when I genuinely wondered if the tour would happen at all, including another automotive crisis on the eve of a tour.
It’s a genuine challenge to tour nationally as an unknown artist, but it was a challenge I felt prepared for. With my two week tour under my belt from last summer, I felt ready to take on a larger schedule and I extended this tour to nearly four full weeks. This is not only the longest tour of my life, but it will mark the longest period of time that I have ever been away from home.
As I anxiously await my turn to go onstage at The Robin Theatre in Lansing tonight I am filled with excitement, anticipation, anxiety, and a good old fashioned dose of fear. Having done this with some degree of success last summer, I feel confident that I can do just as well again this year. Frankly I expect that this run will be more profitable and better attended than my tour last year. Now, these are all very humble benchmarks to achieve, but they do feel like progress. Still, there are zero guarantees.
On this run, I will be seeing a bunch of the folks that I saw last year on my two week run of shows. Several of the cities on my itinerary for the Sheddio On The Road tour were also stops last year. I’ve even found myself booked at a few of the same venues and houses as last year.
There are loads of new venues and townss as well. I’ll be playing and visiting Alabama and Mississippi on this trip, a pair of states I have never even set foot in, and I have been to most of them. Once again, I’ll be playing a number of breweries and a couple of buildings with some genuine history in them. I’m even planning a busking set for a weekday evening in Memphis.
The tour will feature 21 shows over the course of 26 days. Over the length of that run, I’ll perform in 18 states and drive more than 6,000 miles. I’ll play dozens of songs, dole out hundreds of hugs, I will see a load of new friends, and hang with a bunch of old ones as well.
Despite the date staring me in the face on the calendar, I cannot quite believe that we are here, and that this is happening. When I was a boy I dreamed of playing rock star in stadiums across the world. I imagined myself rocking out on a massive stage with pyrotechnics and a psychedelic light show. I could almost hear thousands of audience members that would sing along to my songs.
This tour will look nothing like that, but it will still be a dream come true. I am thrilled to be jumping into my Buick and hitting the road for a month. I won’t have a huge crew and I won’t play in stadiums. But, I’ll bring my songs and stories and a bit of gear to help make it an event. I might not have pyrotechnics, but I did manage to craft myself a DIY footlight rig. And, I put an abstract video together to display behind me at all of the shows on the tour. It might be lo-fi, but it’s gonna be high art, friends.
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Each day on the road, I’ll do my own driving, chart my own navigation, play roadie, guitar tech, promoter, booker, and performer. It’s a lot of hats, but if things have been handled properly, the majority of the work should be done by the time I arrive at the venue for the show. Despite having to do all of this work to make this tour happen, I am thrilled to be heading out there to share my songs with the world.
This tour marks the biggest swing of my creative life. I am both elated and terrified as it begins. It has required a confidence in myself that I truly did not know that I possessed. I hope you can join me at one of the shows this month, and share in the community and camaraderie of these intimate shows. You’re very likely to have a wonderful evening, and you’ll also be supporting a dream becoming a reality.
Thanks to all of you for your support, encouragement, and kindness as things have ramped up on this front for me. So many of you were incredibly generous when I was without a car and feared that the tour might be lost. You truly saved the day and I don’t know that this would be happening without your generosity and support. Thank you ever so much to all of you who helped out at a crucial time.
I am so very proud to tell you that the tour begins now!
Cheers and loads of love,
Matty C
JGID!!! Just get it DONE sir👊🤘❤️
Yay!!! Best of luck!!