Me and my band the Assumptions recently toured in support of our second LP, Exposure & Response. This is the second entry in a journal I kept for the duration of the tour. You can read part one here.

November 17th-November 23rd

Touring has been mythologized for as long as rock bands have been going on tour. The tour song is one of the genre’s most hackneyed tropes. “They say that the road ain’t no place to start a family,” Steve Perry intones on Journey’s “Faithfully”, although I’d like to imagine his family is immensely grateful for the millions of dollars those shows earned. Just as often, tour anthems are celebratory, like with The Ramones’ aptly titled “Touring”, which is essentially the band’s itinerary set to music: “Well, we’ve been to London and we’ve been to LA / Spain, New Zealand and the USA / Europe, Japan and Pango Pango / Canada, Siam, Oz, and Komodo.”

Both takes are emotionally honest, but they’re also completely anachronistic. A song like “Faithfully” stems from an era when multi-month-long touring was a serious contractual obligation for rock bands. (And likely a huge bummer for studio rats like Journey.) Similarly, “Touring” just sounds like a band trying to make the best of a relentless tour schedule imposed on them by a heavy-handed record label. If a punk band today released a song like “Touring”, it wouldn’t just seem disingenuous—it would only last 30 seconds.

Case in point: I will probably never tour Thailand or New Zealand. But one of my favorite aspects of touring is seeing new places with my friends. I was born in LA,  but grew up in Portland—a mid-sized city now in the final stages of its transformation into a culturally homogenous wasteland of boutiques selling expensive flannels and cafes that look like the inside of an Apple Store. I remember driving into San Francisco for the first time on tour and feeling like I was entering the real world. San Francisco, especially, with its steep hills and labyrinth of knotted highways, is a brutal training ground for someone used to driving in Portland—a city with a commuting populace so patient and polite that it’s common for drivers to go five miles per hour under the speed limit.

I want to make sure that this part of touring, spending time in new cities, is always special to me; I want every new city to feel as big and alien as San Francisco did all those years ago. But I can sense that feeling start to dissipate. Maybe it’s because I’m getting older. Maybe it’s because we aren’t covering a lot of ground this...