Dispatches: The Measure [SA]: Episode 3

Today wraps up out series of Dispatches from The Measure [SA] who have been writing in for the past week with updates from their first ever full US tour. The tour is now over, but if you missed it, make sure to check out their new collection of singles, One Chapter in the Book: A Collection of Standard Waits and Measurements. Today we present entries from both Lauren and Fid.You can click Read More for the dispatch.

Part 1: Lauren
We're on our way to our show in Detroit with Cheap Girls. We've been listening to their album Find Me a Drink Home a lot and got them to hop on the show last night in Grand Rapids just for three songs. Those dudes are excellent at playing music and helping us make 60 beers disappear. Somehow, of all places, we try to spend as much time in Michigan as possible. Our friend Marco runs Salinas Records, based in Detroit, and that man alone is enough reason to come out here. Before Grand Rapids we played in Lansing at Uncle Sam's and had a great time with Snow and Shawn Shit, who helped set up the show. Michigan never lets us down.

We're almost home and this past month has flown by. I didn't know how it was going to go, or if I'd be able to make it through being away from home for that long. But so far on this tour I've seen most of the lower 48 states, played shows that went better than we ever expected, learned most of the words to the Walk Hard soundtrack, surveyed our nation's Waffle Houses, watched Barack Obama's inauguration on a TV in Chicago and almost moved to Tampa.

On the other side of things, often times I'm the only girl in any of the bands playing the show and that's one thing that my friends often ask how I handle. Hanging out with my bandmates all the time isn't an issue, clearly, because if it were I wouldn't be going on tour. But realizing that there was a week where I didn't have a full conversation with another girl that wasn't on the phone just seems kind of ridiculous. I was so psyched to be playing with bands like P.S. Eliott, Witches, Gateway District, Hail Hydra, Inertia, Sourpatch and Drunken Boat, among others with female band members. When we're playing with those bands I'm just excited to not be the only girl in the room let alone get to see awesome music. If anything, going on tour has made me appreciate what I have at home even more. Not every town has dozens of bands and a large percentage of female band members like New York does, or feminist collectives or queer friendly scenes. I miss that a lot when we're away and to be honest, it sucks a lot of the time. But traveling like this is about sharing music and hopefully an exchange of ideas, so I'd like to think that it can only get better. A goal for me for the next tour will definitely be to try and seek out those things wherever we go.

Tonight is Detroit, tomorrow Columbus, Ohio, then home. It's been fun!

Part 2: Fid
Tonight's our last show of this tour, and what better place to end it than in Columbus, Ohio. We were supposed to have a "homecoming" show in New Brunswick on Saturday, but of course that fell through. No one in our town is ever going to believe that we got real tight playing every night. Oh well, that's nothing new.

some highlights:
- free sushi and hanging out at the train tracks in Richmond (I missed this cause I was being violently ill at our host's house)
- finally seeing the Pacific Ocean (not surprisingly, it's fuckin' freezing)
- all four of us getting buddy tattoos from our friend James in Las Cruces
- seeing the Space Needle in Seattle, while reading a Tom Robbins book
- getting the stand-up comic that we played with in Texarkana to prank our friend Jay right before we played
- having a "Fletch" intro prepared for us by our friend Matt in Birmingham

some lowlights:
- the aforementioned puking from bad Waffle House
- staying in the most desolate, bloodstained motel room in West Texas while reading "The Road".
- having really long drives and not being able to hang out in all of the cool places that we went
- not being able to move to every town that we played
- trying to do an interview with our friend Todd only to have it drunkenly interrupted every 2 minutes by this kid who later ended up peeing on Tim Burke (this is a whole story on it's own).

The biggest bummer is that the tour is ending after tonight, but it went way better than expected, so hopefully we'll be going back around the country in the summer. Thanks so much to all of our old and new friends that we got to see, for all of the help and for letting us be a part of your lives, albeit too briefly. We met so many great people and bands, and we hope to see you all soon.

punkrockneverstop,
the Measure (Lauren, Tim Burke, Mikey, Fid, Beavie, Walter, and Leroy)