Alex's Tour Diaries

Alex's Tour Diaries PROMO TOUR DIARY - April 2004 WE'RE BACK!!! FINALLY!!! It feels so great to be traveling the world again with a new record about to come out! And I get to see all you guys again! New songs, yay! I love the last record and all, but man, we played those 11 songs and only those 11 songs for the last 4 years...AAAAAH! So what have we been up to the last year you ask? Well, if you've been keeping in touch with The Calling you would have heard that early last year after finishing touring we went home to rest...but rest we did not. We wrote one of the main songs for Daredevil the movie, on that lovely soundtrack with the awesome Evanescence...I recommend picking it up if you haven't already;) Check out "For You". Anyway, Aaron and I then did some separate stuff on our own. I got the once in a lifetime opportunity to record a song called "Why Don't You and I" with Santana! It was truly a dream come true for me, playing live shows with the legend, shooting a video, and some TV as well. He was so cool! Aaron got the chance to produce other bands and write with some other great artists, including Johnny Lang, and even score a movie. We then spent all of last summer up until pretty much right now writing and recording our new record. The music genius Clive Davis helped us produce the record and the final product is truly far better than Camino Palmero (not that Camino Palmero was bad, in fact, if you don't have it, I recommend picking one up:). We are happy, happy! Yes, we took our sweet time to put this new album together, but we had to make sure it was perfect and worth all of your hard earned money. The last tour diary I wrote was for the crazy Brazil tour we did last August, right in the middle of making our new record. That was the most fun tour we've done so far. I know we've succeeded in having star status there now because I'm getting hilariously funny fan-mail from Brazilians asking me things like, "You're posing nude in an American magazine next month? Oh Halex, you are the gross! Won't you be the cold?" and other things like, "You slept with six prostitute while you last here!? And one is pregnant with your love child! You are the Popa! Haha! Popa, no?"...that's awesome stuff man. Anyway, as we finished up recording, designing the new album, shooting a video, and weeding through weeks of auditions for the last few months of 2004, we've been busy putting together a new live band for our upcoming worldwide tour. Unfortunately we didn't have enough time to rehearse before this first promo tour, so Aaron and I split up the duties. He stayed in Los Angeles to work with the new band for the last 3 weeks while I went around the world (literally) to promote the new goods. It sucked flying without my copilot Aaron, but we had to do what we had to do. Just a warning now, promotional work is not normal "show" touring, therefore it is far less exciting, therefore this tour diary will be shorter than most and probably pretty boring:) We'll go through it quick.l..rrright. Myself and our tour manager Sacha embarked on this 3-week mini promo tour on the 20th of March, 2004. Some people asked me before we left if we were going to cancel our promo trip through Europe and Japan do to the rise in terrorist activities and the recent horrible events in Spain and England...my answer was and will always be this: "I am not going to live my life any differently or hesitate to do my job and follow my dreams due to the rising fear of terrorism. That is exactly what they want and I sure as hell am not giving in." So moving along, as we made our way through many countries around the world, the first single, "Our Lives", was hitting radio all over (and is now out everywhere across the globe). We arrived in Paris, France, our first stop, on the 21st of March, 2004. We were greeted by some familiar fan faces, Karima and friends...bearing...what's that?...CREPES!! YES! And...a gift?...A TRAVEL SIZE PING PONG TABLE, PADDLES, AND BALLS!! MINI-PINGY-PONGY! That was much appreciated, thank you Karima and friends:) Sacha and I stayed up all that night trying to play in our hotel room like nerds but it was pretty much impossible, just too damn mini. I started working the next day. Just so you know, a typical promo day involves waking up too early, playing the new CD for the press, telling the same story a zillion times to magazines and TV and radio, playing "Our Lives" and/or "Wherever You Will Go" acoustically over and over, and a lot more than too much schmoozing. The pay off moments are when I get to do some TV shows or something like that and see the fans...other than that, most of the time is spent locked up in a hotel room saying "next, next, next." There was one memorable interview moment in Paris though due to the language barrier. This one girl who interviewed us spoke broken English and had a hard time pronouncing words right. So I'm sitting there in the interview and she's asking questions like, "what's your favorite color?" And, "what would you do if you were Justin Timberlake for a day?"...and then all the sudden out of nowhere she asks me, "Have you ever sh*tted on your girlfriend?" WAH! Sacha and I looked at each other with questioning faces. I was like, "Excuse me?" Then she said, "Would you tell your girlfriend if you were sh*itting on her?" HAHA! I said, "I think she would know now wouldn't she?!" I was crying laughing so hard. The interviewer wasn't getting it cause her next question was, "Have you ever sh*tted on more than one girl at once?" Wow! What magazine is this again? Oh, you mean C-H-E-A-T-E-D? CH sound, not SH sound! Anyway, the rest of the days in France went well and we had some awesome dinners there. Paris is still one of my favorite cities. It was then time to move on to the next country. We arrived in Berlin, Germany, on the 25th of March. I had to perform "Our Lives" acoustically for the first time alone on an MTV show there. I was nervous! But I guess I pulled it off OK. We then headed over to Munich for more days of promo fun! I got to see my family who lives there that I haven't seen since I was touring for the last record over a year ago. Munich was mostly interviews for magazines and newspapers, but they also love their teeny magazines over there full of cute little kids pictures...and I guess I am a cute little kid then....hey, I'm Aaron Carter! No! I am Nick Carter. No. Forget it. Anyway, I was flipping through "Bravo" magazine as I did a photo shoot for them (really nice people, great magazine) and I noticed some things in this magazine, well, let's just say that this magazine just wouldn't fly in America. OK, it's a young, young teens magazine...I flip through...Britney Spears gossip, cool, Westlife lost a member, cool, I'm dating Paris Hilton, cool....WAIT!...that's not me, gosh, sometimes I even get mixed up....OK, I keep flipping...and...AAAH! Naked kids? What the hell? A full-page, totally nude shot of Bravo's own young reader...one guy, one girl. I guess different people send in pictures each month. Rrrright. Oh, and what item is included in a little bag attached to the inside of the teen mag? Makeup? Perfume? Pencils? No, your very own G-String underwear! Of course silly! It is so funny how different cultures treat sex around the world. I mean, G-string underwear and naked kids in a teen magazine on one hand, and then an entire country goes mad about Janet Jackson's boob falling out of her bra for a millisecond on the other. Janet's little pierced boob not only escalated into a mad media frenzy, but also literally pulled our entertainment industry back 20 years. They're taking off songs on the radio that are "indecent", firing our favorite radio hosts, making bands change their already-been-played-a-million times videos, putting delays on live TV broadcasts, etc...all to make things more "decent" for our children. I hate to say it, but I'm with Bravo. If you restrict too much, you don't educate, and without education people get in trouble. Anyway, so getting back to the tour. Munich was cold, man! Like 20 degrees and snowing the whole time, brrrr. Snow is pretty though, through a car window with the heat on high that is...There's no natural layers of warmth on this here the lobby of the random building is a fan waiting for me. I recognized her as soon as I saw her but skeleton:) So get this, I'm walking out of the final photo session in Germany and there in I couldn't quite fit the face to Germany. It turned out it was one of our very first fans we ever had from years back that we use to call "Snow-cone girl" ...don't ask. Anyway, she said she had come all the way from North Carolina, America to see me in Germany cause she knew I'd be there. That's crazy! Snow-cone girl, if you're reading this, thank you for that, you're too sweet. It was time then for me to move on to the next country, my favorite, Italy for some R&R finally. We arrived in Rome on the night of March 27th and drove to my families place out in the countryside for two days off. Yay! After working for 7 days straight I needed to chill. Aaron and I kept each other updated on what one another were doing throughout the tour. He told me that rehearsals were going great over at the home base. I told Aaron that so far I had been getting really, really great response from all the press people regarding our new record. At that point in the trip "Our Lives" was officially out at radio everywhere and people were loving it. Needless to say I was very excited. Our stay at my place in Giove, Italy was awesome and we ate pasta till we popped. My Dad's friend who lived near by had just got his pilot's license and a helicopter, so we all got helicopter rides up and down the countryside...it was so cool! My Dad's building a restaurant/spa/hotel in the bottom floor of our vacation place that's open now, so if any of you Italians want some seriously good food and rest, go to Castello Di Giove, in the city of Giove, an hour North of Rome off the Attigliano exit from the A1 freeway...OK, I know, shameless plug. So our oh-so-nice vacation was over in a flash and we flew up to Milan to start the promo again. On March 30th we started back in with MTV TRL, set right in the most beautiful part of Milan over looking the most beautiful church. I did an interview and performance on the show, but the amazing moment came when I went outside on the balcony high above the street to find hundreds of screaming fans with posters and flags...all there for me! It was very touching for me since I spent so much time in Italy growing up and it's just so weird to be so well known there now. These few fans in the crowd below us had a huge pirate flag and I was all like, "Uh, what's with the pirate flag?" Random. Anyway, I could talk to the hosts of TRL Italy all day cause they are frikkin gorgeous! But alas, we had to leave and do more radio station visits and interviews. The rest of the Italian promo went really well and the dinners there went even better. The next day we headed over to London, England. We arrived in London on the night of the 31st. It was great to be back in a country that speaks English again, I was starting to get really confused and saying thank you in French when we were in Germany and bad Italian words when we were in France. Anyway, on the car ride from Heathrow airport into London, I heard "Our Lives" for the first time on the radio! Capitol FM played it and everyone in the car with me screamed and danced around in their seat. It's a special moment when you hear your song for the first time on the radio...it always sounds different for some reason. Our first couple of days of press in London went fine, but the final day was the day I had been dreading...April 3rd. It started off fun when we did CD:UK and I got to see a lot of the familiar fans' faces in the crowd. Our fake band, for the fake performance, were really nice and very stylish. It was the gig later that day that I had been fearing the whole trip. I had to do two 6 song acoustic sets for a few hundred winners live at this venue in London to be played on radio as well. It's one thing to play a song or two without my partner, but put on a 6 song show solo? I've never done it. I was freaking out until I walked on stage for the first set and looked into the front of the audience...all people I know! And some of them came from pretty far away, like Karima who came from Paris. I felt really comfortable at that point and the show went great. I played some new tunes and some old tunes and a cover song as well. I had time to sign for everyone after the first set, but unfortunately after the second set for new people I didn't have time to sign for them...I had to go do more work. Thank you, thank you to all the fans who called in to win tickets to those acoustic shows. It really meant a lot to me to see you all there supporting this new record. I really did miss this part of my job and was so happy to be out doing it again. The next day it was time to leave England for our final stop, Tokyo, Japan. We arrived in Tokyo on April 5th and spent the rest of that day sleeping. Of course the way too long flight over to Japan was in the most technologically advanced plane I've ever seen. It was a brand new plane on Virgin airlines that was dubbed "the quietest cabin in the world"...and it was. On top of that, all the seats were red stitched leather (like a Ferrari!) and they all unfolded like a transformer to create a bed on the floor! And each seat had a huge monitor with this crazy telephone/controller. I've been on planes many times where you have a controller and can watch movies and play stupid games, but this one was far beyond. First of all, you had Internet surfing and your own E-mail address where you could even IM other seats on the plane or call another seat on the plane with the phone (a good way to pick up chicks if I wasn't a taken man;). You could choose from over 100 movies and TV selections and rewind, fast-forward or even pause for a bathroom break! There were tons of cool videogames and you could play against other people on the plane. But the coolest thing of all on this plane, besides the high-tech bathroom with tile floors and blue lighting, was the bar in the middle of the plane...that's right, a full bar with stools and the whole thing. We had to partake in sitting at the bar and ordering some sake just for fun. Man, after a little of that sake at 35,000 feet and sitting there at that bar, surrounded by blue lights, we started to feel like we were on the starship enterprise...being slightly tipsy probably brought on that feeling though...I guess there wasn't a bar on the starship enterprise now that I think about it, strange... Anyway, Japan was just non-stop magazine interviews and TV in the hotel room for like 5 days straight. I started suffering from cabin fever! What does the sun look like? I don't know. For some reason, Sacha and I watched the movie "Zoolander" like 100 times throughout the trip and it kept getting funnier and funnier each time. What is it with really stupid movies that after you watch them over and over they start becoming funny? Well, if you have the time to watch this stupid movie 100 times, I guarantee it will become funny eventually...OK, moving on. It's been like two years since we were in Japan last time, but things haven't changed much. The same 3 fans that were waiting in our hotel lobby 2 years back were there waiting for us each day again...too cute:) The same crazy cell phones with video conferencing were being used by everyone except that now they also have Direct TV on them as well...you heard me, hundreds of satellite digital TV channels right on their little cell phones to be viewed at any moment. I need that!!! OK, I don't. And finally, the same great food was awaiting us each night after work. I've never eaten so much in my life...I must of gained at least 1/2 a pound;) We ate sushi everyday and Korean Barbeque (where you cook your food yourself right in the middle of the table in this giant charcoal grill) every night, but the best of all was the Shabu Shabu (don't know if I'm spelling this right, but honestly, do I spell anything right?). Shabu Shabu is when you cook different kinds of meat yourself by dunking them right in this giant bowl of boiling water with vegetables and sauces...it's like fondue. Anyway, this one night it was slices of pork that we were dunking and eating for hours. By the end of the meal we felt so sick that Sacha said to me in the car ride home that he was going to barf pork and I said, "Yah, I'm gonna "Bork" too, dude!" Anyway, I felt so sick all night, but I kept making myself laugh alone in my room every time I felt like I was gonna "Bork"! So, after way too many TV shows, magazine interviews, radio visits and photo shoots, we were finally finished with Japan on April 10th. We got on the final plane flight home and arrived safely, but totally jetlagged. We've spent the last few days rehearsing and it was so cool to come back to a band that knew all the songs perfectly and sounded great...thanks Aaron:) So now it's time for Aaron and I to head out on our next journey, a two-week American radio tour and another week in Europe for more...promo! Yippee! Hopefully I'll get to run into some of you guys here in America soon. I'm so excited for you all to hear our new record, "Two"! It's so close now to coming out...middle to end of May everywhere except in America where it will come out on June 8th, my Birthday! Guess what I want for my Birthday... Until next time:) Loving Life, Alex Band