(no subject)
We’re back in action!!!!!!! It’s been too long and we’ve missed that amazing rush of being on tour. And what a better place to start it all up again than BRAZIL!!! Before I get into what has happened in the last two weeks, I’ve got to fill you all in on what we’ve been doing all year. First we had to take some time off after the whole Daredevil garbage and almost two years of touring and just be normal people for a second. You know, sleep in the same bed every night, wake up in the same city every day, see movies, buy houses, and just feel grounded for a while. Aaron and I did a few side project type things in the meantime…I did the whole Santana thing which is going really great and Aaron produced some songs for an amazing artist on A&M. After all that we started writing every day for weeks and weeks at Aaron’s place and have created some amazing new music that we’re really, really proud of. We’ve grown up a lot as people and as musicians in the last three years since Camino Palmero was recorded. After touring the world I’ve learned so much and made so many great friends and fans…thank you guys so much for sticking around and waiting with us all these months. Your continued support never ceases to amaze Aaron and I. It’s so exciting to finally have a whole records worth of new material and we really can’t wait for you guys to hear the new songs.
So after the writing process, we did some rehearsing with some new really great studio musicians and then it was into the studio. This Brazil tour happened to fall right in the middle of the recording process so we had to stop after completing 7 songs, mix them all, and then find new touring musicians and rehearse for the tour. Our new drummer for this tour is a long time friend of Aaron’s named Justin. They were actually in elementary school together. We played with him a long time ago when I was 15 and we always wanted to jam with him again, but it just never worked out until now. He really did an amazing job on this tour and totally blew me away. The bass player we found is named Kaveh and he is huge! 6’ 6” tall with size 15 shoes! We actually played with him a few months back when we did this private gig for Nintendo execs in Hollywood. He lays down the groove great and has been a lot of fun on this tour. We rushed to get ready in time and headed out on our first tour in almost one year. With mixed feelings of excitement, anticipation, and anxiety, we left Los Angeles on Monday the 11th of August to embark on what was to be by far the craziest and most intense two weeks of my life…in the last two weeks…uh, yah…
Well, you can’t start a tour outside of America with The Calling without having a scary plane flight….and of course we did! Yay! Our second flight from Miami to Panama, the first stop on the tour, had something wrong with it seconds before take off (been there, done that). Honestly, by now, I’m like “whatever”, I’ve been through this before, but it doesn’t change the nervousness you feel when they have to turn back right before takeoff and fix some electric problem. After waiting an hour or so we tried again and although the problem was “fixed”, I couldn’t help wondering the rest of the flight if it really was;) Flying through a giant lightening storm in Panama as we were landing didn’t help things, free falls and all, but we touched down as always and breathed in a breath of hot sticky air, man it’s good to be alive.
It was 2 AM, so fans were non-existent at the airport. We were, however, greeted by our insanely huge Panamanian bodyguard, “KING”, who spoke Italian as well as Spanish, so I had fun telling him all the dirty things I know in Italian during the car ride home while he played the God Father soundtrack as background music….very weird.
The next day we had a show, but we also had a little time to kill in the morning. So naturally we all wanted to see the Panama Canal and we did. It was quite an incredible thing to witness. A ship the size of a giant 10 story building, lowering and raising, as it made it’s way through giant metal locks with doors the size of football fields. We did the tourist thing and listened to the history and all. I had no idea that is costs each ship so much money just to go through the canal. The one ship we saw had to pay a toll of $67,000! That sucks! But I guess it’s better than going around the long way. So anyway, after our little outing it was off to the gig.
We were warned ahead of time that this particular show would not be sold out due to the fact that it was scheduled at midnight, on a Tuesday, during exam week, and all our fans are around 15 years old. So I was expecting a small show, but it was still pretty packed and a perfect first show to get us ready for the mass hysteria in Brazil. It was hard to hear each other that night though, since we were playing in what seemed to be an airplane hanger with a metal ceiling and tile floors…not so good for loud live rock music. We got off stage and everyone had a huge smile on their face especially Justin who had only played for two hundred people in his past gigs, and that night we played for over two thousand. I went out after and signed a little, but had to go back to the hotel to sleep since we were waking up early the next morning to fly to Rio.
On the way to the airport the next day, everyone was talking about has scary it was waking up at 4 in the morning to a huge earthquake, saying it was a 5.5 or something….and I was like, “what earthquake?” Apparently Justin and I were the only ones in Panama who just slept right through it! Hey, I’m use to sleeping in a coffin on a tour bus while the driver is crazily swerving to miss hitting deer all night…a little earthquake wasn’t enough to even get me to turn over and mumble. So, we got to the airport, signed a little and headed off to Rio, Brazil.
We arrived at 1AM after about another long 7-hour flight. No major problem other than everyone on the plane was a fan. We hadn’t even gotten to Brazil yet and I was spending the whole plane flight taking pictures with all the stewardesses and the pilots. It was cool.
We stayed at a secret hotel in Rio away from the city, so we weren’t too easy to find. It was a nice hotel, but they were doing construction all night and the fire alarm in the hotel kept going off every ten minutes…I was like “NO! JESUS! let me sleep!” Needless to say I was tired and a little cranky the next dayJ
Everyone except me walked up to some cliff 5,000 feet high and went hang gliding all day…Flying over the rain forest and landing on the beach. I’m bummed I missed it but I don’t know if I would have the balls to do that again. Aaron did it though and I was shocked to hear he loved it…I mean if you can jump off a cliff 5,000 feet high with some cloth wings connected to you and fly down for 30 minutes and land on the beach…you shouldn’t be scared to fly in an airplane. But alas, that fear never goes away.
We went to sound check at the venue in Brazil and I was like, wow, this place is f*cking huge! I could run back and forth on the stage a few times and it would be like running a marathon. After sound check, I went into our dressing room and it was huge too! And it actually had a bathroom that worked without cockroaches and even a Jacuzzi. I noticed everyone was watching CNN on the TV with a look of horror and I immediately new something was wrong. The first thing I saw on the screen was a shot of millions of New Yorkers walking in mobs right on the highways and bridges, and then more people everywhere, in Toronto and Cleveland, all over the place. My heart sank assuming the worst with terrorism or something. It sounded pretty fishy to me and I continued to worry the whole way to dinner about all those people without power and how your everyday life just shuts down and how if it was terrorism, that those guys are pretty powerful to pull of something that grandiose. And if it wasn’t terrorist, I’m sure they were watching CNN too, saying to each other, “Why didn’t we think of that!?” I just kept hoping it was nothing more than an accident.
We went to dinner at a typical barbeque sort of Brazilian restaurant where all these guys come around with giant pieces of every kind of meat you can imagine on big metal sticks. I do eat meat, but this was intense. Just as I was starting to calm down over the power outage thing the f*cking power went out in the restaurant and everything went dark! It was almost funny for a moment cause I knew it was just coincidence, nonetheless very bizarre. They got it back on and everyone went back to what they were doing…Eating meat, big giant slabs of meat. One guy came around with like 50 little brown circular things all skewered together on a metal stick. So Kaveh and I took a few of these things. After eating one and being quite disappointed in its chewy texture, we were notified that they were chicken heartsL NO!!! ::gag::gag::: After that we stayed to foods we recognized the rest of dinner and it was pretty good…..but come one, little poor chicken hearts? That’s not right…..
It was almost time to go on and I was feeling a little nervous since there were about 8,000 people out there screaming for us. The biggest crowed we’ve ever played for as a headlining band. Right before we walked on stage, we were told that the whole power outage thing in America was not terrorism and just a freak occurrence that will be fixed shortly. That really made me feel a lot better and I was hyped and ready to rock. That show was insane. Girls passing out left and right, masses of people jumping all over each other, this is what I had been waiting for the last 12 months of sitting on my ass at home. There were moments of the show when every single person in the audience was singing the songs so loudly that I couldn’t even hear myself anymore…and it was a beautiful thing.
The set we had put together for this tour was really fun and we got to play songs that we’ve never played live before. Like opening each show with “For You”, which was always one of the songs the crowd sang the loudest and we played a new song too…Yes, only one new song…I don’t want our whole new record all over the internet before it’s put out. That would suck. We also played 2 cover songs, “Alive” by Pearl Jam and “With or Without You” by U2…my favorite song ever written.
I couldn’t sign that night in Rio too much cause we had to fly again the next morning very early to Recife. So I went to sleep for a few hours. It was sad to leave Rio the next morning after only staying there for 24 hours...It’s such a beautiful city. I would have loved to have a day off there. Maybe next time?
The flight from Rio to Recife was painless, but we arrived early morning instead of late at night, so there were…ah, just a few fans there;) Every single airport employee down to the security guys and their kid’s kids were waiting for us at the baggage claim for autographs along with a live news TV crew. While everyone started rushing at us with security holding them back, the live TV moved there way into our circle as we waited for all our millions of bags (hey, I only took two bags this trip!). By that time we were seen through the doors from the outside of the front of the airport and that’s when we started to hear the screams…There were a shi*t load of fans out there! We tried to do an interview the best we could with the TV crew over the screams and pounding on the glass of the baggage claim walls. Aaron and I kept plugging the fact that our drummer, Justin, doesn’t have a girlfriend and is looking for a Brazilian brideJ Security decided it wasn’t safe to run through the front of the airport, so we got a car to pull up on the runway and we escaped by driving under the planes full rock and roll style. It was cool.
We got to the hotel and it had fans all around it and inside the lobby too. We had to do the human security wall thing to make our way to the elevator as I kept getting my favorite Clash shirt ripped off me. Once we got in the elevator we had to push every floor 1-20 to throw the fans off down in the lobby who were probably looking to see where we’d stop.
The view from my room of the ocean below was incredible. The water was crystal clear and there were so many people on the beach, not to mention a huge crowd of fans that had made their way to the outside parking lot of the hotel directly straight down from my room, which was on the 18th floor. This hotel room was funny…no hot water, well, actually scratch that, no water at all for me…my ceiling was ripped open hanging towards the ground so that I had to get on my knees and crawl under in to get to the bedroom. There were brooms and trash cans everywhere and dirt all over the floors, the TV didn’t work, I had no towels….basically, I assumed they had just sent me to the wrong room. But no, it was the right room and luckily we were just staying there for one night. The city was really pretty though and it was worth it just to have that view of the ocean. By this time I was really tired from lack of sleep, so I tried to zone out and get some rest. My rest was cut short quickly to the screams of fans below… “ HALEX!!! I LUB YOU!!!! HAAALEEX!” I stuck my head out the window and it was all over, they saw me, and they weren’t going to stop screaming until I left for sound check 3 hours later. So I spent the next few hours throwing them down bracelets and guitar picks and signed pieces of paper folded into little airplanes. It was good fun until the wind started to pick up sending everything flying across the street into bushes and trees. I got some video from the 18th floor of what looked like little specks running in competition, dog piling on top of each other, and crawling to find what was being thrown. It’s time like those I would have loved to sign for them, but it was just to crazy to go down there, so, the window had to do. Sacha, our new tour manager extraordinaire, another life long friend of Aaron’s, was down out side by the fans one his cell phone. Mine rang seconds later in my room and he told me that one of the fans wanted to say hi, so I talked on the phone a little, while waving my hand out the window…man were those screams loud!
After sound checking in another big theater, we drove into the oldest city in all of Brazil for dinner. It was really pretty inside this village and it reminded me a lot of an Italian village with cobblestone streets and stupidly narrow roads. Now I’m not trying to sound like a complainer, but man, none of the cars in Brazil feel like they have shock absorbers. Every ride we had was like being on a roller coaster at Magic Mountain… Granted the cobble stone streets that night didn’t help much. The other funny thing was that all our security guys were slacking big time the whole tour, everyday, like saying some place is 5 minutes away and then after an hour of driving asking where we wanted to go, or getting us lost routinely coming back to our hotel at night, or having nothing arranged security wise ahead of time at places we would go to and then find we had walked into a lion’s den of fans, or bringing fans INTO the hotel or dressing room so that we could sign for them without asking us first...I mean, what if we were changing or something? Never mind;) Don’t get me wrong, I love to meet and sign for fans all day long, but sometimes I’m just too tired or working on something or it’s not a safe environment to sign for fans…people did get hurt on this tour physically because of crazy situations, including me, but I’ll get to that later. Anyway, back to that little city in Recife...
So after the writing process, we did some rehearsing with some new really great studio musicians and then it was into the studio. This Brazil tour happened to fall right in the middle of the recording process so we had to stop after completing 7 songs, mix them all, and then find new touring musicians and rehearse for the tour. Our new drummer for this tour is a long time friend of Aaron’s named Justin. They were actually in elementary school together. We played with him a long time ago when I was 15 and we always wanted to jam with him again, but it just never worked out until now. He really did an amazing job on this tour and totally blew me away. The bass player we found is named Kaveh and he is huge! 6’ 6” tall with size 15 shoes! We actually played with him a few months back when we did this private gig for Nintendo execs in Hollywood. He lays down the groove great and has been a lot of fun on this tour. We rushed to get ready in time and headed out on our first tour in almost one year. With mixed feelings of excitement, anticipation, and anxiety, we left Los Angeles on Monday the 11th of August to embark on what was to be by far the craziest and most intense two weeks of my life…in the last two weeks…uh, yah…
Well, you can’t start a tour outside of America with The Calling without having a scary plane flight….and of course we did! Yay! Our second flight from Miami to Panama, the first stop on the tour, had something wrong with it seconds before take off (been there, done that). Honestly, by now, I’m like “whatever”, I’ve been through this before, but it doesn’t change the nervousness you feel when they have to turn back right before takeoff and fix some electric problem. After waiting an hour or so we tried again and although the problem was “fixed”, I couldn’t help wondering the rest of the flight if it really was;) Flying through a giant lightening storm in Panama as we were landing didn’t help things, free falls and all, but we touched down as always and breathed in a breath of hot sticky air, man it’s good to be alive.
It was 2 AM, so fans were non-existent at the airport. We were, however, greeted by our insanely huge Panamanian bodyguard, “KING”, who spoke Italian as well as Spanish, so I had fun telling him all the dirty things I know in Italian during the car ride home while he played the God Father soundtrack as background music….very weird.
The next day we had a show, but we also had a little time to kill in the morning. So naturally we all wanted to see the Panama Canal and we did. It was quite an incredible thing to witness. A ship the size of a giant 10 story building, lowering and raising, as it made it’s way through giant metal locks with doors the size of football fields. We did the tourist thing and listened to the history and all. I had no idea that is costs each ship so much money just to go through the canal. The one ship we saw had to pay a toll of $67,000! That sucks! But I guess it’s better than going around the long way. So anyway, after our little outing it was off to the gig.
We were warned ahead of time that this particular show would not be sold out due to the fact that it was scheduled at midnight, on a Tuesday, during exam week, and all our fans are around 15 years old. So I was expecting a small show, but it was still pretty packed and a perfect first show to get us ready for the mass hysteria in Brazil. It was hard to hear each other that night though, since we were playing in what seemed to be an airplane hanger with a metal ceiling and tile floors…not so good for loud live rock music. We got off stage and everyone had a huge smile on their face especially Justin who had only played for two hundred people in his past gigs, and that night we played for over two thousand. I went out after and signed a little, but had to go back to the hotel to sleep since we were waking up early the next morning to fly to Rio.
On the way to the airport the next day, everyone was talking about has scary it was waking up at 4 in the morning to a huge earthquake, saying it was a 5.5 or something….and I was like, “what earthquake?” Apparently Justin and I were the only ones in Panama who just slept right through it! Hey, I’m use to sleeping in a coffin on a tour bus while the driver is crazily swerving to miss hitting deer all night…a little earthquake wasn’t enough to even get me to turn over and mumble. So, we got to the airport, signed a little and headed off to Rio, Brazil.
We arrived at 1AM after about another long 7-hour flight. No major problem other than everyone on the plane was a fan. We hadn’t even gotten to Brazil yet and I was spending the whole plane flight taking pictures with all the stewardesses and the pilots. It was cool.
We stayed at a secret hotel in Rio away from the city, so we weren’t too easy to find. It was a nice hotel, but they were doing construction all night and the fire alarm in the hotel kept going off every ten minutes…I was like “NO! JESUS! let me sleep!” Needless to say I was tired and a little cranky the next dayJ
Everyone except me walked up to some cliff 5,000 feet high and went hang gliding all day…Flying over the rain forest and landing on the beach. I’m bummed I missed it but I don’t know if I would have the balls to do that again. Aaron did it though and I was shocked to hear he loved it…I mean if you can jump off a cliff 5,000 feet high with some cloth wings connected to you and fly down for 30 minutes and land on the beach…you shouldn’t be scared to fly in an airplane. But alas, that fear never goes away.
We went to sound check at the venue in Brazil and I was like, wow, this place is f*cking huge! I could run back and forth on the stage a few times and it would be like running a marathon. After sound check, I went into our dressing room and it was huge too! And it actually had a bathroom that worked without cockroaches and even a Jacuzzi. I noticed everyone was watching CNN on the TV with a look of horror and I immediately new something was wrong. The first thing I saw on the screen was a shot of millions of New Yorkers walking in mobs right on the highways and bridges, and then more people everywhere, in Toronto and Cleveland, all over the place. My heart sank assuming the worst with terrorism or something. It sounded pretty fishy to me and I continued to worry the whole way to dinner about all those people without power and how your everyday life just shuts down and how if it was terrorism, that those guys are pretty powerful to pull of something that grandiose. And if it wasn’t terrorist, I’m sure they were watching CNN too, saying to each other, “Why didn’t we think of that!?” I just kept hoping it was nothing more than an accident.
We went to dinner at a typical barbeque sort of Brazilian restaurant where all these guys come around with giant pieces of every kind of meat you can imagine on big metal sticks. I do eat meat, but this was intense. Just as I was starting to calm down over the power outage thing the f*cking power went out in the restaurant and everything went dark! It was almost funny for a moment cause I knew it was just coincidence, nonetheless very bizarre. They got it back on and everyone went back to what they were doing…Eating meat, big giant slabs of meat. One guy came around with like 50 little brown circular things all skewered together on a metal stick. So Kaveh and I took a few of these things. After eating one and being quite disappointed in its chewy texture, we were notified that they were chicken heartsL NO!!! ::gag::gag::: After that we stayed to foods we recognized the rest of dinner and it was pretty good…..but come one, little poor chicken hearts? That’s not right…..
It was almost time to go on and I was feeling a little nervous since there were about 8,000 people out there screaming for us. The biggest crowed we’ve ever played for as a headlining band. Right before we walked on stage, we were told that the whole power outage thing in America was not terrorism and just a freak occurrence that will be fixed shortly. That really made me feel a lot better and I was hyped and ready to rock. That show was insane. Girls passing out left and right, masses of people jumping all over each other, this is what I had been waiting for the last 12 months of sitting on my ass at home. There were moments of the show when every single person in the audience was singing the songs so loudly that I couldn’t even hear myself anymore…and it was a beautiful thing.
The set we had put together for this tour was really fun and we got to play songs that we’ve never played live before. Like opening each show with “For You”, which was always one of the songs the crowd sang the loudest and we played a new song too…Yes, only one new song…I don’t want our whole new record all over the internet before it’s put out. That would suck. We also played 2 cover songs, “Alive” by Pearl Jam and “With or Without You” by U2…my favorite song ever written.
I couldn’t sign that night in Rio too much cause we had to fly again the next morning very early to Recife. So I went to sleep for a few hours. It was sad to leave Rio the next morning after only staying there for 24 hours...It’s such a beautiful city. I would have loved to have a day off there. Maybe next time?
The flight from Rio to Recife was painless, but we arrived early morning instead of late at night, so there were…ah, just a few fans there;) Every single airport employee down to the security guys and their kid’s kids were waiting for us at the baggage claim for autographs along with a live news TV crew. While everyone started rushing at us with security holding them back, the live TV moved there way into our circle as we waited for all our millions of bags (hey, I only took two bags this trip!). By that time we were seen through the doors from the outside of the front of the airport and that’s when we started to hear the screams…There were a shi*t load of fans out there! We tried to do an interview the best we could with the TV crew over the screams and pounding on the glass of the baggage claim walls. Aaron and I kept plugging the fact that our drummer, Justin, doesn’t have a girlfriend and is looking for a Brazilian brideJ Security decided it wasn’t safe to run through the front of the airport, so we got a car to pull up on the runway and we escaped by driving under the planes full rock and roll style. It was cool.
We got to the hotel and it had fans all around it and inside the lobby too. We had to do the human security wall thing to make our way to the elevator as I kept getting my favorite Clash shirt ripped off me. Once we got in the elevator we had to push every floor 1-20 to throw the fans off down in the lobby who were probably looking to see where we’d stop.
The view from my room of the ocean below was incredible. The water was crystal clear and there were so many people on the beach, not to mention a huge crowd of fans that had made their way to the outside parking lot of the hotel directly straight down from my room, which was on the 18th floor. This hotel room was funny…no hot water, well, actually scratch that, no water at all for me…my ceiling was ripped open hanging towards the ground so that I had to get on my knees and crawl under in to get to the bedroom. There were brooms and trash cans everywhere and dirt all over the floors, the TV didn’t work, I had no towels….basically, I assumed they had just sent me to the wrong room. But no, it was the right room and luckily we were just staying there for one night. The city was really pretty though and it was worth it just to have that view of the ocean. By this time I was really tired from lack of sleep, so I tried to zone out and get some rest. My rest was cut short quickly to the screams of fans below… “ HALEX!!! I LUB YOU!!!! HAAALEEX!” I stuck my head out the window and it was all over, they saw me, and they weren’t going to stop screaming until I left for sound check 3 hours later. So I spent the next few hours throwing them down bracelets and guitar picks and signed pieces of paper folded into little airplanes. It was good fun until the wind started to pick up sending everything flying across the street into bushes and trees. I got some video from the 18th floor of what looked like little specks running in competition, dog piling on top of each other, and crawling to find what was being thrown. It’s time like those I would have loved to sign for them, but it was just to crazy to go down there, so, the window had to do. Sacha, our new tour manager extraordinaire, another life long friend of Aaron’s, was down out side by the fans one his cell phone. Mine rang seconds later in my room and he told me that one of the fans wanted to say hi, so I talked on the phone a little, while waving my hand out the window…man were those screams loud!
After sound checking in another big theater, we drove into the oldest city in all of Brazil for dinner. It was really pretty inside this village and it reminded me a lot of an Italian village with cobblestone streets and stupidly narrow roads. Now I’m not trying to sound like a complainer, but man, none of the cars in Brazil feel like they have shock absorbers. Every ride we had was like being on a roller coaster at Magic Mountain… Granted the cobble stone streets that night didn’t help much. The other funny thing was that all our security guys were slacking big time the whole tour, everyday, like saying some place is 5 minutes away and then after an hour of driving asking where we wanted to go, or getting us lost routinely coming back to our hotel at night, or having nothing arranged security wise ahead of time at places we would go to and then find we had walked into a lion’s den of fans, or bringing fans INTO the hotel or dressing room so that we could sign for them without asking us first...I mean, what if we were changing or something? Never mind;) Don’t get me wrong, I love to meet and sign for fans all day long, but sometimes I’m just too tired or working on something or it’s not a safe environment to sign for fans…people did get hurt on this tour physically because of crazy situations, including me, but I’ll get to that later. Anyway, back to that little city in Recife...