How do you travel for weeks on end and maintain your sanity? How do you keep your body from breaking down and quitting on you? How do you uphold close friendships despite rarely seeing the people you love most? We asked 23 musicians—rockers, rappers, folk singers, DJs—to give us an inside look at how they travel. Here's what they said.
How He Rolls
"I'm pretty cut and dry and methodical with my packing. Everything is narrowed down. The only thing that could be simplified that I don't want to is that I travel with two laptops. One is for music and one is for everything but music. That just comes from the fact that I had a laptop stolen at a show once and I lost so much stuff. As much as you want to back up, you're never going to get it all. When I lost three months of work shit on top of music shit, I was like, that's not really a good idea."
Worst Experience
"I had my laptop stolen the day before I went to Nigeria for a show. That's not the trip you want to be doing tech recovery on."
Pro Tip
"For jet lag, if you're going overseas, that first day when you get to another time zone, don't take a nap, just force yourself to go to sleep at the local time. That's the make-or-break. If you're able to stay up and go to bed at whatever time you normally go to bed, you're way better off. If you start taking naps, your body gets used to taking naps. The worst thing is if you're on the other end of the world in Australia or Asia and your body needs to sleep at like 7 or 8 p.m. and you sleep three hours and you wake up again and hang out at night, and then sleep again for another three hours from 4 a.m. to 7 a.m., and every day is these two half chunks of sleep. That's horrible."
How They Roll
Bethany Cosentino: "I have a Louis Vuitton backpack that I got on eBay maybe three or four years ago, and strangely enough, the person I bought it from was a Best Coast fan. They left a note inside of it because they recognized my name. I changed my name on eBay after that."
Buried Treasures
Bethany: "I have this Texas hat that I bought, like, 15 minutes ago when I was wandering the streets of Austin. I kept getting approached by fans, which is totally fine, but I was just very stressed and hot and didn't know where I was going, so as a joke we said, 'Let's buy me a hat for a disguise.' But then people still recognized me then I just had this silly Texas hat on, but it's actually kind of cool. I'll probably wear it at home. Oh yeah, the Korn sticker on my phone! So, on this trip, we're staying at an Airbnb, and I was looking in one of the drawers in the kitchen for a corkscrew so I could open a bottle of wine, and we found a label maker, and we're obsessed with Korn. It's not a joke, we actually really like the band Korn. I couldn't do backwards 'R' so I just did capital 'R' because I thought it would look cool. That's how my phone spells Korn, too."
Staying Entertained
Bobb Bruno: "We have dice for anytime we're backstage and bored. We just start a game and take each other's money. We play threes."
Bethany: "We tour on a bus now, pretty much, but when we're doing these shorter things where we're in a van, we'll put on music that either relaxes us or music that's just kind of our guilty pleasure, even though we don't really have guilty pleasures, we just like everything. A lot of people would be like, 'Korn is lame,' or 'Sugar Ray is lame,' but we genuinely like a lot of the songs that those bands make, so we're not embarrassed to talk about it."
Throwing Out the Clock
Ryan Lindsey: "The clock kind of goes out the window when you're touring a lot. That's the part of touring that I really like. Being in a different place every night kind of affords you the ability to throw out a clock. Because if you're thinking about time, you can kind of go a little crazy. So I just like to not think about it. You know when you've got to show up to a place, and if you're going to be late, you call the people, tell 'em you're going to be late. You figure they're used to a band being late now and again. And we're procrastinators, so we're usually late. You figure out ways to just jump on the lazy river and just kinda cruise through."
How to Not Go Stir Crazy
"When I climb in the van, I like to have a cup of coffee with me, and I also like to bring a backup. So I have two cups of coffee—that's the way I roll. If one of 'em gets knocked over, I don't start crying. Oftentimes we like silence in the van. We get into a thing called 'van therapy.' Maybe on a late night drive when it's totally dark and quiet, and you just look at the back of somebody's head. It's kind of like when you're talking to a therapist, when you're on the couch and you're not really making eye contact."
What He Reads
"I judge the quality of my life by how much of the Sunday New York Times I get through. I actually like the Business section. It's the only time I really can read about business and even understand it. When you're a band leader, it's pretty good to check in with that."
Keeping Perspective
"You might be on a Learjet or fly on the Concorde, or you might be sleeping in a hotel where you lay down at night there's a little mint chocolate there for you. Or you might be sleeping in the back of the van using a Converse All Star high-top for a pillow. But you know, it's all pretty much the same. You're going from gig to gig, and if you're lucky enough, when you get to that gig, people are happy to see you."
Worst Experience
"Breaking down at night. In Australia on our way to New South Wales we broke down just past Tamworth. We're kind of in the middle of nowhere. We broke down in the afternoon but had to wait five or six hours, and it got dark. It was kind of scary. We were right on the side of the highway and we couldn't move the car. The next day the tire popped on the next drive. So anyway, that was shit."
Biggest Lesson From the Road
"You just learn a lot about how people work. How I work and how bandmates work. Just human emotions. Being in such close proximity to people around the clock teaches you a lot of things about how people work."
The Key to Acceptance
"Is to not ever expect comfort, because when you find it, it's really rewarding. If you expect it, it's crazy. You're never home. There's never anywhere that's even similar to home. I think that helps a little bit, but also just talking to people. The easier it is for you to have a conversation with someone, the easier it is for you to feel like you're not losing your mind. Traveling alone is the hardest. I have the benefit of being someone who goes somewhere to meet people. They tend to know who I am or like what I'm doing. But it's a weird shift, because on days of shows, I'm someone who has a certain set of privileges, but on days off, most people are probably just like, 'Who's that loser? Why is he here?'"
Pro Tip
"Always take public transportation. Public transportation is always the way to go. Unless you're in a rush, you really dive into a city when you're in public transportation. And people will help you. If you look confused or just ask, anyone who can help you most likely will."
Family Mementos
Robby Grote: "I always like to bring my allergy medicine because I have really bad allergies, and that's no good for singing. I also like to bring a notebook so I can do some writing, and the really cool duffel bag my father got me in Morocco. It's a handmade bag from these people that tan leather, which is pretty cool. It's like a carpetbagger thing. I pack a lot of clothes because I sweat really bad, so I can't really wear the same thing twice. Off the record: Everyone smells like shit. I smell great, the other guys smell like shit."
Staying Sane
"On this tour I brought an Albert Camus book. You sit in the van a lot and stare at your phone a lot, and it's good to try and keep your mind active."
People You Meet
"Austin's a good place. It's a pile of bones and we drank Mad Dogs under a bridge with crust punks and Skanky D, and boy did that get wild. We heard some stories. There's a glass pyramid in the Bermuda triangle. It's controlling the world, that's the headquarters. And what was the dog's name? That's what we learned under the bridge in Austin. Oh yeah, and we met Anthony Kiedis under the bridge."
What He Packs
"A back up jar of Fiber Grease pomade. It's the best stuff out there, but it's hard to find. Most shops in most cities don't carry it. My Saint Laurent motorcycle jacket never really leaves my back. And my iPhone and Macbook, because those are my tools to write and record songs."
The Best Kind of R&R
"Ramen has become a go-to lately. Ramen spots are pretty easy to find these days, and it's hard to mess that up, so whatever city we're in it's usually a safe bet. Besides, it's a pretty good hangover cure. Sleep is a valuable resource on the road. You gotta count your hours and get it while you can so that you save up your energy for shows. Sleep masks are clutch. I always thought they looked funny, but they do the trick."
Worst Experience
"Our bus caught on fire during one of our shows on my last tour in Lincoln, Nebraska. A space heater was left on and a mattress caught on fire. We lost almost everything, except somehow everyone's Apple products managed to survive. Shout out Steve Jobs. But somehow the show went on and we made it to the next city to perform the next night."
How They Roll
Erika Wennerstrom: "Minimalism is where it's at. Even though I overpack, there's this free aspect of everything I'm living off of for a month is in this suitcase. This very packed, overly heavy, too much suitcase. It makes me really realize how little I truly need."
How They Survive
Jesse Ebaugh: "We've been on the road as a touring band for a long time and have found that sleep and exercise make for a much more pleasant traveling experience. We all prioritize running. We're all runners. And it's always runs in horrible places. It's like a Priceline hotel by a highway, so you go for a four-mile run, and it's nothing but car dealerships and dust from semis. I can't use the gym. I can't do it inside."
Pro Tip
Jesse: "Make sure everyone gets fed on a regular schedule. I was in the Boy Scouts as a young teenager, and being in a van is like being in the Boy Scouts. You're with a whole bunch of people that you aren't related to, but it's your job to get along. And when somebody's blood sugar gets low, everything trickles out. And you've got to deal."
Never Leaves Home Without
"Some sort of knife. Always some sort of knife. I'm from Chicago, so a knife is minimal. Not for protection, but for like cutting wrist bands off. It's such a tool that people don't even realize. I can use a knife to screw something in. You can use a knife to get things out of things. A small little skinny one. I carry this knife that's inside of a writing pen."
Craziest Thing He's Seen
"Flying into O'Hare, when we were landing, I saw a shootout at a gas station. On the plane. I'm looking and I just see a guy go pow, pow, pow, pow. A straight up gun shootout as we land. I was like, that is the craziest thing I've seen in my life."
Pro Tip
"Wherever you go, act like you've lived there. If you go there wide-eyed, you're going to have a very different experience. If you go to London and you're running up to people you don't know asking them what's this, people are going to send you off. To save yourself from having a bad time, don't treat it like it's a tourist attraction. Don't go to London and talk to them like you're at Universal Studios. Have respect for the area. They'll be more inviting and they'll show you things. Go hang out and strike up a conversation with somebody, and then after that conversation go, 'What's cool around here?' That will open up a whole new world for you."
What He Packs
"The vest is what I wear every night on stage. I did all the studding and sewing myself, and I shredded my fingers as I was doing it all, because they're really tiny and hard to put on. The headphones, obviously a form of escape. I got the American flag backpack, you know, 'cause I like classic red, white, and blue colors. You start off bringing all these shirts and pants, then you don't even change at all."
Essential Tools
"The knife my dad gave to me. You gotta have a knife, in case you wanna stab an avocado or something. You know what I mean? I got the Duncan Butterfly Yo-yo. I bought that in Las Vegas. When I was a teenager, me and my friends always carried around Yo-yos. We had a Yo-yo gang. I can do around-the-world, I can almost rock the baby in the cradle. I can make it sleep, walk the dog. But, you know, that's kid stuff. I have a GoPro for some reason, I don't know why. Sometimes you catch a moment or two, you know?"
The Invaluable Stuff
"I've got these two little drawings that my parents did of themselves. My parents are my number one fans, so I just keep those with me. I got my asthma inhaler because I'm very asthmatic. I always have a lot of pens, I love pens and art supplies. I've been doing a lot of writing. Just first thing in the morning, writing kind of stream of consciousness-type stuff helps clear the mind. I have Susan Sontag's book of journals, which is just a cool book to flip through. Just reading someone else's random thoughts sparks your own ideas."
Worst Experience
Shana Cleveland: "When we first started touring we had a lot of van problems. There was always something potentially wrong. Then we got a really good van and we got into a horrible car accident. We got out of that alive, which is the best thing you can say. That van was really good, but that was totally out of our control. Since then, we made an investment in a pretty decent van, and it's been pretty smooth."
Coolest Experience
"Once we were in New York and we played at the Museum of Modern Art. It was an incredible opportunity, but we didn't really know anybody there. It wasn't our usual crowd. But this one girl that we knew from playing shows with her old band, she came up to us after the show and said she worked in Rockaway Beach at this burger shop, and it's right next to this surf club. 'If you guys want to come play a show, you should.' So we had the day off and she came and picked us up and drove us to this surf club in Rockaway Beach to play a show. It was so fun. There were probably like 10 people there. It was great."
What He Packs
"I have a collection of Gil Evans scores. Gil Evans was a jazz arranger, did a lot of stuff with Miles Davis. Headphones, a phone charger, something to keep my glasses on when I'm going crazy onstage. Extra pants and shirts, just in case. You never know. Ricolas, that's important. A book called The Poetry of the Blues. Car keys that I don't need because I'm on tour, but I keep them anyway because it feels weird to keep them out of my pocket. Alka-Seltzer."
Keeping His Mind Sharp
"The one thing about touring that's tough is that, unless you're really proactive, you don't get a chance to learn very much. You can spend 18 months without learning anything. I used to carry around a lot of books, but I switched to a Kindle, so that was nice. I'm reading a book called Postwar which is about Europe after World War II. I spend a lot of time overseas as well as touring here, and I'd just like to know a little bit about where I'm going, culturally, and know some interesting questions to ask to learn about where I am. I have a couple Kurt Vonnegut books on there, too."
How He Stays Healthy
"We've got a flask, that's always good if you don't have any money. I usually put rum in there because it mixes nice with lots of juice drinks, and so it makes it kind of healthy. I just went to Whole Foods. Normally I might be a bit more lax, but on the road I might get sushi or something on the healthier spectrum. At home I'm not as concerned about it, but at home you just have so much energy to make up for the fact that there's a little bit more of an ebb and flow of what your energy can be. But here, you're just spending so much energy all the time, so you don't have the excess time or rest to make up for poor decisions."
What She Packs
"I got my 1979 KISS tour shirt. I love it so much. I got my 1950s vintage Boy Scout shirt that I also wear almost every day. It's got this cool patch on the side, like this weird compass thing. I love it. It's real soft. I don't wear a lot of makeup, but I have different shades of lipstick and chap stick and a couple Bobby pins. My hair's really frizzy, sometimes I've just gotta get it out of my face."
What She Collects
"I have my Wolf Man and I have a Godzilla that I got pretty recently. We were in Wolverhampton, England, and I found him in an antique store. He was the puppet master of the these two marionette puppets, and I was like, 'I gotta have him, I'm sorry guys.' And he moved from my amp, to the Wurlitzer, to me just carrying him around on stage. Now I carry him every single place that I go. He's kinda become my sidekick, in a way. And now because of him I've gotten super into Godzilla and Godzilla history. I have some G-Fan magazines now and I'm on some Godzilla message forums."
What She Reads
"Right now I'm reading a Margaret Atwood essays compilation called Moral Disorder. It's really good, she's really an amazing new author. I read The Handmaid's Tale a couple months ago. I read short stories and I read comic books. I have a couple Japanese toy magazines that I read. It's stuff that I can kinda pick up quickly and get some fun facts or a good short story. And my manager just gave me the new Kim Gordon book called Girl in a Band. I'll probably read that next."
Why an Electronic Band Likes Analog Technology
Harrison Mills: "We've got a disposable camera. It's just for weird little moments. I think a lot of that stuff gets forgotten and you can't always back and look on it. We usually keep those cameras for almost three months, so the pictures are really spaced out. That's what I think makes it so special. It's those moments you totally forgot about that you'll find in there."
How to Not Kill Your Partner
Brandon Rush: "I just listened to Keith Richards' autobiography from front to back. It's something like 18 hours. Johnny Depp narrates part of it, and then Keith does part of it at the end, so that's pretty inspiring. I feel like it actually changed my brain a little bit. I felt pretty rock and roll. He talked about his relationship with Mick Jagger, and how when you get to a certain point of success in your career, you realize that you're dependent upon your writing partners. There can sometimes be a little bit of dissension, because you're like, 'I can't do this without you and I hate that.' But when it comes down to it, we're brothers, and so we always smooth it over, and Keith's relationship with Mick was always the same thing. They'd always bring it back around, like, 'This is us. We've known each other for this long.' Kyle [Sears] and I have known each other for 12 years, and been at this, playing music together for 12 years, so, family."
How He Keeps It Simple
"We pretty much played a gig every night this past winter, so there wasn't a whole lot of time to really get out and see a lot of things. We were caught in all those winter storms on the East Coast, so it feels like we've been on a submarine for a month and we're just finally coming up for air, up for sunshine. You end up spending lots of time just indoors, you know, either on the bus or you find a little restaurant or bar to hide out in for a while. I started getting into playing pool when I was quite young, growing up in some of those old roadhouses. A good friend of mine, Joey Lee, taught me quite a few lessons, so I take a pool cue on the road and play a little nine-ball every now and then. I take some of the survival essentials, like sunglasses. Always keep some road cash on you in case you get in a bind. I try to keep stuff that I'm gonna wear on stage every night pretty simple and the same, just because it's easy, you don't have to decide what to wear every night, you know? And you're in a different town every night, so not like you're around the same folks."
Whiskey and Stetsons
"I think it's good to drink whiskey. Bulleit introduced the rye a few years ago and it's one of my favorites. I have several songs that reference booze, and I haven't been able to squeeze in a Bulleit Rye reference yet, but this is the good stuff. My Stetson, this specific model, I believe it's called The Range. It's got various beer stains and it's been kicked around a little bit from playing shows, but this is probably my favorite hat to wear. It's got a three-inch brim, so it's not too big. But it's not as small as the Open Road, which is the two-and-three-quarter-inch brim. This one's just a little bit more country. And if they come in felt like this, it's great, because it can double as an umbrella."
Why He Watches House of Cards on the Road
"What I like about it, is even though this guy seems ruthless, at the end of the day, I think he loves his wife. Their family is still solid. Like anything in life, people are not really good or bad, they're this combination, and I think this show does a good job of showing that people are human and they can be really good at something but also struggle with major issues. Watching the way he works with his wife, they're this D.C. power couple and they don't have a perfect marriage, they're even honest with each other about their mistakes, but it seems like they ultimately work together really well. I think depictions of, for lack of a better word, successful marriages on TV, are few and far between, so I think that's fascinating to see that done really well."
Coolest Experience
"We did a tour last year in the winter where we were doing Canada and Minneapolis and all these absurdly cold places. Then, we finally found ourselves in L.A., and we were there for a couple of days. Everyone just un-thawed and I remember being like, 'It's so cool to be doing this.' Often it will happen where we're like crunch, crunch, crunch, and then we're somewhere for a few days and it's warm and great. The same thing happened in Ferrara, Italy. We were flying every day, and it was terrible and everyone was tired, and suddenly we're in Italy for three days in this absurd castle. The trick is basically getting yourself accustomed to living in sub-human conditions."
Pro Tip
"Don't talk to the person sitting next to you on the plane until they say you're about to land on the speaker. Wait until you're in the final descent, and then if they want to talk to you, if they've been looking at you like they want to talk, then you allow it. But it's headphones in all the way through."
Worst Experience
Devin McKnight: "I lost a pretty nice bag in San Francisco and it had all my shit, all my shit. It had our demos, my laptop, my hard drive to my laptop with all the back up on it, and it was gone. I ate a really potent weed edible. It was a terrible high mistake. I lost all that good stuff."
Sadie Dupuis: "It was after we had missed our flight because I was trying to get a burrito. We had been stuck in San Francisco an extra day for those reasons. So it's sort of the burrito's fault."
Best Experience
Sadie: "Just now we played a set with Hannibal Buress drumming for us and that was probably a life on the road highlight for us."
Never Leaves Home Without
Sadie: "We all have notebooks."
Mike Falcone: "There's a dollar store in Bridgeport, Connecticut that has had a surplus of Slipknot notebooks for the past two years. Two or three years ago, they had a huge rack of N'SYNC notebooks, and next to it was a huge rack of Slipknot notebooks. The N'SYNC ones sold out pretty quickly, but the Slipknot ones are still there, and they're only $1.50. I bought like 20 of them and passed them out to my friends."
How to Keep Comfortable
Marty Frawley: "I bought Gaviscon on tour, you know what Gaviscon is? It's for really bad heartburn and stress relief. I usually chew that because I get really sore tummies from being nervous or anxious. And high fever tablets, because I get sinus problems. I also bring two notepads that I don't write in, because I think I'm gonna be a writer, but I'm not. I also bring a laptop. I read the Internet. I try to read books, but I don't have the attention span, and I'm not very good at reading. I reckon it's because books aren't actually very good. I like movies. I worked in a video store for seven years. But yeah, I bring a laptop and I've got some films on there I downloaded, a couple of cheeky illegal downloads. I just downloaded all of The Jinx. I also have lots of comforting films, lots of family films. I could definitely watch Ninja Turtles. We've got Wayne's World in the car, that's a good one."
How He Stays Healthy
"Everybody got their brand new Nikes before the tour. The band is very into being healthy. I think eating well is really important for us, especially on these long stretches of tour. Getting your exercise in is pretty essential. I think somebody snuck some Taco Bell today, but not me. We don't mess with fast food. Period. Except Wendy's Frosties are sort of a band vice."
The Challenges of Staying in Touch
"The most profound thing about touring that I don't think people understand is how much it affects your personal relationships. What's weird about tours... I really hate to compare it to a prison sentence, because it's not bad at all, but it is in the sense that you go away and it either seems like forever to you or it seems like a blink of an eye. But it's never the same time as the time in your old reality. Two months is a really big deal in regular life. Even if your life seems kind of mundane and you do your day-to-day, in two months a lot of things happen, and when you're on the road, you're constantly checking out friends living their lives back home and you're not present. It's hard to explain what it does. It has this really strange effect. You get back and you're kind of displaced. It's hard for me to describe and hard for me to make people understand what it's like to have missed out on a lot of things. It's very strange."
Just the Essentials
"You gotta have socks. If you don't have enough socks, you will fuck yourself over. Just having enough socks is very vital. Socks and underwear at all times, but man, I just travel light. Less is more. I don't want to carry all the bags around and things like that. I'm very likely to lose stuff. But the basics are always important. You know, Hot Cheetos."
How to Survive McStomach-aches
"Food on the road is so horrible. It's the craziest feeling in the world to know you have to eat a Big Mac. You don't want to, but then you start to like Big Macs again, and that's the worst thing you could possibly do. My DJ is a vegetarian, so finding food for him is hell. You'll be in fucking Topeka, Kansas, looking for vegetarian food and literally not find one thing. We're trying to get on this health food wave, though, making our own alternatives, different kinds of things. I'm trying to get my salad game up. There's nothing better than a nice salad. I can't just eat the leaf, that's not me, I probably need too much dressing. But a salad is something that doesn't make you feel heavy, because when you travel you can't just be sleepy all day, you gotta be onstage. And if you have crazy stomach issues onstage, it might make a dangerous number two."
Related:
What's Inside Your Travel Bag, Wayne Coyne?
What It's Like to be John Legend at SXSW
Will Butler Does Not Wake Up on a Tour Bus
