Do you have any favorite TV shows, movies or games you keep up with on tour?
There’s a lot of great shows, it’s kind of the golden age of television right now where there’s so much! I’m trying to catch up on The Handmaiden’s Tale, that’s the show I’m watching right now, and of course everybody loves Game of Thrones, excited for the new season there. I keep bringing it back to sports but the one thing we always have on tour is Madden on Xbox. We play constantly on tour and I just beat somebody by 83 points, which is not my record but I’m very happy about that.
We know that a lot of bands love to play FIFA on tour, do you think you could get those bands to convert to Madden?
It’s always been our goal to try to assimilate UK bands into Madden, which at the very least on the surface-level they’re interested in it, but invariably terrible. But that’s okay because they don’t know it. That’s okay because it’s a sport that doesn’t exist to them. I don’t like FIFA because it’s so small, like, the guys are tiny, it’s not that much fun, you’re like, looking at ants running around! Plus, the most scoring you can do is like 1 to 2, that’s not great. I like basketball games because you can score the whole time. I really just like scoring in games, that’s it.
What’s your favorite food to eat on tour?
Well, alright. So I have two different things; I used to, in my “more unhealthy days” have one specific thing when like I came home from every tour which was an egg-drop pizza, which is a full pizza with like a pound of scrambled eggs on top of it and then I would eat it in its entirety and lay on the couch for like 3 hours. I don’t do that so much anymore, but it was delicious. But I do like pizza, that’s my guilty thing, so being that I eat vegetarian and vegan and don’t eat dairy, I eat a vegan pizza, but there’s some great places. I live in Los Angeles so there’s a lot of options!
What is the best thing about being on tour?
The best thing about being on tour is the shows, and I know that kinda sounds like an obvious answer. The truth is, and I don’t think that people that don’t tour know this: obviously like there’s the drudgery of the sameness every day can be both great because you get into the rhythm, but also very agonizing after you’ve been doing it for a long time because every day is Groundhog day. You have this sameness that exists, this bubble of things being different from the real world. Particularly when I was younger I’d get so lost in that, because I didn’t have a whole lot of life experience. I was like in this bubble of everything being the same and everything being available all the time or whatever. I think ultimately when I was younger the shows became less and less exciting for me because it was always this rush of doing this thing that I do for 9 months every year. Then the last year and a half I really rediscovered the love for the fact it’s really cool that professionally I get to sing songs that I wrote and people come listen to me do that. It’s one of the coolest things in the world’s the best thing is the shows, being able to connect with people be on stage and have this moment, almost like a church like where everybody is feeling good. You’re happy to be there, they’re happy to that you’re there and it’s a good energy. Even the shitty shows are better than not doing a show.
What’s the worst thing about being on the road?
When I’m gone too long I miss my home, I miss my wife, I miss my dog, I miss all that stuff. Truthfully the thing that probably grinds the most is just a lack of perspective when you’re in a foreign place. Even if you’ve been there a million times, things are still just a little too different. I would say that being on tour for like 9 months if you’re an American in Europe is like, if there’s 7 things you love every day, you get 5 of them every day. Then those 2 things that you don’t get will start to annoy you a little bit after a long time and so even though it seems small, just the difference can be a little grinding.
Do you have any kind of schedule or routine whilst on tour?
Well with Warped Tour in particular, it’s completely regiment based because you have to get up at 9:00 AM, the schedule comes out, you don’t know when you’re going to play, and you kind of have to prepare yourself whether you play at 12:30 or 9:30 or whenever. I look like a cartoon character because I wear the same thing every single day on warped tour but I have 5 of the same vest and pants and shoes. My closet looks like “Doug” or something, when you open it it’s just all the same thing. The routine is just getting up every day; I exercise in the morning, I try to eat something that’s not going to make me feel like shit if I have to play early, you know, poop in a bag, (laughs). It’s an important part of my day! No but truly, Vans Warped Tour is incredibly routine for me.
What is the one thing you couldn’t live without on tour?
Pants. It’d be very hard to be on stage, legally, without any sort of pants. Once, when we were in the state of Utah, we were playing a show in a club, in like 2009 or 2010, and obviously small club and stage. I used to wear tight spandex with a belt, and you could just pull those right down, so a kid reached up and just pulled my spandex pants off, and a mother called the police for indecent exposure, and then I was told I could never play in Utah again. We never listened to that and there was no police report filed, they just sort of strong-armed me because I didn’t take my pants. The point is, I learned that day that we can’t go on tour without pants that will stay up. I can’t get the pants that I wanna wear from Walmart.
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