Westland – 2nd ROAD BLOG from Warped Tour 2012

Westland is one of the many bands that will and have been playing on Warped Tour this summer. These guys will be rocking out on the Ourstage.com Stage for the next week and they will be writing a blog sharing their experiences! Check out the second entry after the break.

Warped Blog #1 Day 1:

For the first day of Warped we had to drive a grueling 26 miles from my house to get to our hometown date in Mansfield, MA at the Comcast Center.  I have to say that it felt weird having our first date on the tour be the date that I have gone to my whole life; almost instilling a feeling of deja vu in my mind, a feeling that I have done this before even though it is the first date on my first ever tour.  That being said once everything was loaded into the venue there was my first hint of nerves, not that anything would go wrong, but the notion that I would be playing to all of my friends and family at this show and if I didn’t perform as well as I knew we could have then they would never let me live it down.

As our set time rolled around and we made our way to the stage, I noticed something that I have never had; people waiting to see us play.  I have been in numerous local bands and played countless shows but I have never seen such a crowd of people that I had never met in my life waiting to see me play.  Even with all the nerves, a brush of calm waived over me as the first note of our sample started.  It was one of those feelings that one can’t express, the feeling that all of your hard work has finally amounted to something, the feeling that people out there actually cared about what I was doing.  What made me even more assured about what we were doing was that as our set drew on, more and more people started coming to check us out, including many bands that I have looked up to as a musician.

As our set drew to a close I did not know what to expect.  As a fan of music, I pretty much thought that a band played their music and then they were done.  Boy was I wrong, as a band music is not the only thing that you do, there is a completely different side and that is selling merchandise.  We are not being payed to play on this years tour and therefore the only way that we can make it to the next stop is if we sell enough tanks, CDs, shirts, etc.  It is a side to the business that I never expected and one that will definitely take some time getting used.  Long story short we did well enough to make it to the next stop on the tour and so you guys must suffer through a few more of these road blogs.

As Taking Back Sunday closed out the Massachusetts date we finished packing up our tent and gear and some friends from the band Shout it Out and us headed out to our rest stop for the night…. my house.  I learned the hard way what happens when you bring 14 people back to your house after a show like this.  No it was not a party, no drugs, no alcohol, it was something much worse: my mom broke out the baby pictures.  There is nothing worse than having 12 people see pictures of your dance class from when you were 5…. and then instantly tweeting about it. So until we get out of Uniondale, this is Nick signing off.

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