Cawston - CRAZY TOUR STORIES

In this Crazy Tour Stories segment, Jenna Johnson, of the pop punk band, Cawston, shares one of her stories from being on the road. You can check out the story below:

How Calgary stole my heart, my vocals and my toenail.. ‘s ?

First of all, lemme tell you this isn’t the craziest story you’ll ever hear, more so unfortunate for myself and my bandmates cause I’ll probably never stop talking about “how the first time we headline a tour I lose my voice and 3 toenails” I digress.

It all started on the second leg of tour, we were headed to Calgary, Alberta for the first time. We were super stoked to play a new city and province. I had been feeling a little congested for about a week but had managed, I saw my doctor before we left and he assured me I didn’t need antibiotics and I was having an asthma flare up and that my lung capacity was 100 below normal .. cool! That being said I got the okay and we were on our way. I was feeling completely fine leading up, my chest was feeling a little heavy and short of breath but nothing I couldn’t manage.

Chatting up friends and fans all eve (that’s where I think I went wrong) hot tip, don’t work your own merch table if you can have another band mate or someone else do it to save your vocals.

We go on, our sponge bob intro silences the room, everyone’s a little confused but also smiling and starts to sing along. We start with DFYF it’s sounding awesome, we’re all in sync they energy is great! I’m feeling good. We go right into our second song, the songs a little more difficult in range and breath work but is totally fine and then out of nowhere my voice feels like it’s been stolen, you know that part in little mermaid when Ursula steals Arielle’s voice , yeah that’s what it felt like. So we go into the third song with my most difficult in range and I’m like “listen, I don’t know what is happening but my voice is gone. I’m going to give you everything I have but we’re two songs in and it’s gone” At this point I’m just hopeful my comedic relief is gonna get me through, so I pick up my inhaler and start shooting it into the crowd, anything to buy me a little time. Luckily I have a friend come up to help me on the 3rd song and I battled through 8 more.

Apparently it’s a thing in Calgary, it’s known to dry you up and completely mess your chest up. I’m so grateful for the crowd in Calgary they were so nice and lovely, they really made an unfortunate situation a little more manageable.

Okay so you got the stolen voice and heart, but what about my toenails?

Honestly I don’t actually know, after the show we went to the hotel and I decided to have a soak in the tub, I notice my one nail was wiggling so I started to pick at it and half of it came off, then I felt the other one and the same thing happened, and then one more, I jumped out of the tub and went over to the guys and asked if I was dying. I have nail psoriasis and apparently this is a thing that can happen, but I like to think I just rocked out so hard my nails busted off.

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