Out East/99 Cents at a Time

Greetings from Richmond, Virginia. We got here late last night after driving all day. I try to route things so the jumps are small, but sometimes...you have a day off and a long way to drive. We went from Nashville to Richmond, and by the time we got to Virginia it was dark so I don't really know what Virginia looks like yet except the Richmond airport across the street from the motel. Yep. The drive was fun, though. Somehow we got to wondering what British rap sounded like, which lead to a big iTunes download frenzy of songs by British, Scottish, Russian, and Japanese hip hop. Check out "Bonkers" by Dizee Rascals. Cool song. On Wednesday we drove through Memphis from Little Rock to Nashville and found some BBQ. I discovered that my friend Tiffany in Nashville had at one point sold merchandise for Lady Gaga before she was crazy famous. Of course I flipped out. There's a Merch Person that I could learn from. Memphis! Yesterday we started off with a brunch meeting with Susan's awesome publicist Brandy at Noshville Deli in...yes, Nashville. Noshville This is our exploratory tour for the year...meaning these are all new venues and tried and true crowds and fan bases have not been built yet. Susan has worked hard to build Texas and the Rocky Mountain tour run, and the Southeast seems like a logical next step in terms of what is close to Texas and full of music fans. As the booker I won't lie and say it's easy to do these runs the first time - sometimes crowds are good, sometimes not. The venues we have booked are all great, though. The folks we have met have been awesome. And you have to do something the first time so you can build it the next time. We're taking advantage of the new strangely re-modeled Motel 6 rooms -- they look like IKEA spewed all over, in a good way. Gone are the weird floral bedspreads. It's hip. And it's cheap. Yay Motel 6!