The Harry Potter Alliance

By Matt Maggiacomo

September 10, 2009

Whomp The House Tour 3: Mental Preparation

A tour really begins the moment you start booking it – you have to cut a path across the country in your mind before you can cross it physically. I’ve imagined this entire tour several times over; the point A to point B to point C of constructing that initial schedule, the forced rearrangement of cities when a venue falls through, the highways we’ve driven so many times now that we could probably find our way from Rhode Island to Santa Monica without consulting a map… Then there’s the obsession over details, the financial considerations, the anxiety over being away from home for a month and a half, the excitement over certain cities you know will be very successful…. By the time you’re actually done booking a tour, you’ve already completed it five or six times in your brain. Maybe more.

So, it’s because of all this that I say that I’m late in starting this blog. I could’ve started it in May and had plenty to talk about. Right now I’m absolutely swamped with things I could talk about, like the fact that I’ll spend every moment between now and October 2 making merch for tour, organizing equipment and supplies, practicing my songs if I feel it’s necessary, and spending time with friends and loved ones. Most of my time will be spent making merch; I make all my t-shirts and tote bags myself, and a few of my CDs are also self-burned.

I could talk about that stuff, but honestly it’s just going to bore you. So many blogs and vlogs out there deal exclusively with the everyday minutiae of life – I want this tour blog to be much more substantial than that. I want it to serve as a supplement to the tour for those of you who will attend a show, and I want it to serve as a decent replacement for those of you who won’t. Moreover, I want it to give you all a better idea of what touring entails, why we love to do it, and how the difficulty of traveling the country and playing wizard rock music to small audiences is far outweighed by the happiness and satisfaction derived from knowing that we’ve accomplished something significant.

A successful tour alone is something significant. Breaking even on tour is a sign that you’re doing something right. Actually being able to live off the money you make on tour means you’re doing something… incredibly right. As usual though, Justin Finch-Fletchley and I want to do a bit more than play music and pay our bills: We’re also working a huge fundraising effort into the structure of our tour. You may remember that we raised $1,600 for disaster relief in Haiti last year; this year, we are raising money for the HPA straight-up. Why? Because we’re awesome. Obviously.

I plan to keep this tour blog free of dry information about fundraising, except that I will include data on how much money we’ve raised as we go along in case anyone wants to keep track. Our goal is to raise $1,000, but we’re both confident that we’ll be able to exceed that basic goal.

So, in the mean time, here’s some other data:

Days Left Until Tour: 22
T-Shirts Screen Printed So Far: 0

(PS. You can check out our entire tour schedule by clicking here.)