Heyheyhey In Rockers and Welcome to The Lobby coming at you this month while enjoying a nice hot cup of Japanese Sencha at a little tea shop outside of Detroit. It’s a day off in the very middle of a super busy Goo Goo Dolls tour with Train and neo-soul singer Allen Stone that runs through mid August snaking around the USA, stopping at over 50 cities along the way. It’s been a great tour full of packed houses and tons of sing-alongs in all kinds of weather, as most of these Summer shows are at outdoor venues it’s been interesting navigating the rains and winds that come with an amphitheater tour. But the bands are so great to tour with, it’s really been a pretty amazingly harmonious and rock filled summer!

In the midst of this jam packed schedule we’ve been keeping, GGDS released the first single from an album to be released on Sept 13th called Miracle Pill and have been performing the song live in the set now for the past month. It’s great having newer music to play for people, and it’s even better when the Internet allows them to hear your new ideas right away to enjoy that night at the show. It used to be strange to play new music for your audience, but since the immediacy of streaming people discover new music much more quickly now. People seem to dig the new song, new video (which we talked about last month) and seem to be eagerly awaiting the new release.

On our Summer tours we do Meet and Greets nightly, sometimes up to 100 people, it’s great because we get to meet a ton of amazing fans and briefly share stories with people who we’ve shared an emotional relationship with from afar, some for many decades now. It really feels like family out here, with all of our kids running around, everybody getting together for dinner every night, and just maneuvering all of the details of real life at home while you’re traveling with a small group of people every day. It really is a strange situation in a large scale touring situation, connections that are somehow so close but yet so distant and while we are in the middle of thousands and thousands of people every night we’re strangely insulated from the entire experience, the meet and greets tend to bridge that gap. It’s a lot of energy before going out to do a show, but I think it completes the cycle and for that I’m truly grateful.

There was a scary moment on the tour when one of the crew bus drivers had a seizure and their bus crashed on the highway. Luckily, although some of the crew was hospitalized and the driver was pretty badly hurt, no one was killed in the crash and the tour continued on a couple of days later. We look forward to the next moth of shows and will be heading to South America soon to do shows with Bon Jovi including a performance on the beach at the legendary Rock in RIO!

My wife and daughter have been in Tokyo for the past couple of months spending some time with our family in Japan, my daughter’s Japanese is getting much better, and they’ve gotten back to Tokyo Disney a few times! I’m so glad they get to spend the summer visiting Japan while I’m gone away on tour, but wow, I really miss them. They’ll be back in the USA in a bit and will join us for a week on the tour!

Shonen Knife returns to the US to play a bunch of shows in the US this fall, representing Osaka internationally in a big way this year supporting their Sweet Candy Power album, they just completed a tour of Europe, are currently in the UK with an Australian tour scheduled in the fall after the US run!

Thanks so much for checking in on me here in the pages of the mighty In Rock! I’ll be back next month with more touring and the frantic lead up to The 17th Annual Music is Art Festival in Buffalo …. more on that next month! See you soon !

Peace

Robby