How Tour Breaks Preserve Sanity, Health and Bands

by Joel Falconer

From bands who are signed to major record labels, to independents slogging it out, musicians are frequently on long tours; six months, a year, eighteen months, sometimes even more, of constant globe-trotting while the executives lean back in their big stuffy chairs at home and enjoy the green smell of cash, cash, cash.

Reasonable Touring

It’s true that when you’re getting your band off the ground, a hard-slogging tour will help increase your national visibility and develop a nation-wide fan base.

It’s true that those hard-slogging tours keep established bands in business. But isn’t there a smarter way to achieve the same result?

Here’s where the record labels have all their thinking mixed up: long tours mean more money, right? This is certainly not the case.

The Risks of Touring

These horrifically long tours can (and almost always do) cause a variety of problems that mean that all parties concerned will be losing out on money—not to mention more important things—in the long run.

• Health problems and physical exhaustion
• Musical and creative burnout
• Band tension and subsequent relationship breakdowns
• Family tension and subsequent relationship breakdowns
• Self-medication as a coping mechanism; drug and alcohol addictions are just one example

When the band is suffering from issues such as these caused by excessive touring, money should be the last concern of anyone involved with the band; helping them fix their problems, their health, repair their families and bands, and kick addictions should be the first order of business. A good band is a self-repairing band, one where the care is taken to develop relationships that are strong enough to survive under stress.

But we know that money is always the first order of business for the record companies. They don’t really care about the well-being of artists, no matter how short-sighted that attitude truly is. A powerful, long-lasting brand will bring in more money over time than a one-hit wonder, no matter how big that hit is.

Formulating Policy

All the members of my band formed this policy from the get-go:

We will never, ever tour so excessively that we alienate each other, our families, or ourselves, destroy our creativity or cause serious damage to our health.

This is a policy we make binding between ourselves, and hence it predates and supersedes any agreements made with others during our career. If one of those parties has a problem with the clause, then we’ll simply go elsewhere with our business.

A band can do a hard-slog tour and form a following, but it has to be done in such a way that the band, and the band’s families, can handle it. That means frequent breaks, and not on the other side of the world, but at home.

I have a wife and a son. If I could not take them with me, I’d minimize the amount of time spent on the road. However, I do have plans in place that allow me to take them with me at minimal cost. We’ll talk about how to do this another time.

Make reasonable touring and tour breaks a matter of band policy, and never back down from band policy when dealing with external forces, especially record companies. It’s better in the long run.

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