The Indigo Elephant Newsletter

Around the time you open this, we should have announced our first ever tour! Here’s the poster announcement:

I thought it would be interesting this week to talk about why we want to tour after eight years of being together, how we planned a tour that works with our own limitations, and what we expect to get out of touring!

We’ve been a band for eight years, but there’s been a bunch of factors that stopped us from going on tour:

• We started as a college band, so we had to balance playing shows with midterms and finals (UC Davis is on the quarter system too)

• Julius and Brenden moved to Illinois for a few years, forcing the band to be in digital songwriting mode for a long time (That’s how we wrote our EP While We Were Away)

• Our live band is big, and as we’ve grown up from college it’s hard to coordinate 7+ people who all have day jobs (It’s always a blessing to play a show with the full band)

• COVID happened

However, with the release of The Art of Erosion, the stars aligned for us to hit the road. The album is a banger, and we’ve been growing an online fanbase throughout the past year. We’ve met a lot of great friends and musicians who can help us book shows in places we’ve never played. It takes a community to make this happen and I’m glad we have the support. We’re in the right phase of our lives where we can take some time and money to focus on our art!

But what about the realities of planning a tour in 2025?

This incredibly relevant article by Jonah Krueger highlights the dire state of touring as a small band. In particular, the rising costs of goods post COVID-19, the death of smaller venues due to monopolies like Ticketmaster, and the squeeze of the musical middle class makes touring just damn expensive. I highly recommend reading it to learn about the conditions that make touring “A Supposedly Stupid Thing I Hope to Do Again”. All of these factors make it so that going on tour seems irrational in 2025.

Lucky for us, being artists means we’re making irrational decisions all the time!

In order to make this work for us though, we had to scope out exactly what kind of tour we could handle at the moment. We’ve never been on tour and we’re still a small indie band, so most of our shows are DIY all-ages events. Most of us are working 9-5’s, so we need to hit the road in a way that makes sure we don’t use too many vacation days. Our horn players can’t make the SoCal dates, so we’ve planned set lists both with and without them. We don’t know how tour is going to affect us mentally, so instead of doing a long tour immediately, we want to microdose the tour experience.

With those constraints in mind, that’s why we kept the tour to just California, and mostly on the weekends. The 4 day stretch at the beginning is the only time we’ll be driving a sprinter van but even that is enough for us to learn a lot about touring.

We’re okay with this small scale tour because it’s still an achievement if we pull it off. Just being on the road means we get to play our music to new crowds, meet new people and musicians, and connect with people who may have found us online. Also, we don’t think this is the last time we’re touring. I mentioned earlier this feels like a test run, so we want to take all the lessons we learn from our November tour into next year. Don’t hold me to this, but I’d love to plan a larger, regional tour in the Spring of 2026. I hope we can grow enough where there’s people all over the west side of the US that want to see us, and we’d love to meet y’all too. Who knows, maybe we’ll be able to play to our fans all the way over in Germany or Singapore one day! Bear with us until we grow big enough to make that happen.

In the meantime, if you don’t live in California but you want to watch us live, keep November 4th open. We’re planning to stream our final rehearsal before we go on tour so anyone around the world can watch us play live! We’ll announce on socials soon :)

A sneak preview of the physical CD

This is the final CD design for the physical albums that Cliff has been working hard on. He’s literally sitting in with me in our band’s Discord voice chat as I’m writing this sentence, making final changes to the art before we start printing the albums!

If you ever go see live music, purchasing merch is the #1 way to support your friendly touring musicians. We’re excited to take the album on the road and get them in the hands of fans all over California. Just reading this newsletter, you can see how much we put into our art, so please consider grabbing a CD off our Bandcamp when the album releases October 24th!

Until next time,