Touring Quotations

I studied the lives of jazz singers who would tour Europe, and... what I learned was life was big ride for them. They'd seen the dark side of humanity... but touring the world playing jazz, it was a truly carefree way of living. A great escapism, if you like.

The thing I always liked best about touring abroad was constantly running into different people, different cultures, different foods. It really pumped up my batteries... I'm constantly playing to a demographically diverse audience... one generation is driven by nostalgia, the next by curiosity. And that's why I have no plans to retire.

I'm quite grateful to the BBC. They helped me back onto the touring circuit.

The part you don't expect when you start out is all the people who come into your life wanting a piece of you, not caring about your wellbeing. The insane schedule is very difficult. Touring looks very glamourous but it's hard and gruelling - the travelling, the meet-and-greets - it was too crazy.

When I was a kid, while touring East Berlin - back when there was an East Berlin - I got my left foot stuck in an escalator in Alexanderplatz. A few hours later, thanks to blowtorches and chainsaws and East German soldiers and the U.S. Embassy, my foot was released, and I along with it.

The best part of touring is the opportunity to make the music. You get to do what you love and have the ability to go out on stage every night and create.

You never get tired of the buzz of touring.

I have been performing and touring and doing shows all over the world. But it's really something special to get back on the U.S. cast of 'Stars on Ice.' It's something I let go because of family commitments.

I have chosen to keep my personal life separate from my music, as the two are exclusive from each other, and I want to remain that way. I'll talk music, production, writing songs, touring with anyone but keep religion, politics and world affairs off the table, as my expertise is in songs and music.

I've always been interested in both writing and music. When I first started getting published, I also worked as rehearsal pianist for the Boston Ballet, touring with them all over the U.S.A. and Europe - I wasn't making enough money from writing to support myself.

They are the only people in the world who I can truly trust and rely on. Touring gets really lonely. I guess I have friends around me but when you're paying them can they ever really be true friends?

After touring with David Bowie last year, I was inspired to look at what I wanted to do as an artist, and I realized I wanted to go back to the music I fell in love with when I was eight years old.

I think if you retire from touring then people think you are retired.

In the crazy world of touring, if something gets stuck at customs, I can do a show with just my amp!

I guess I have friends around me but when you're paying them can they ever really be true friends?

Of course one can't eat in a civilized fashion while touring in theatres. But I still manage to get my three meals a day. I find that is sufficient for training.

Whenever I visited China in the past, the relationships always felt superficial; there was no time where I felt those moments of conflict and delight that make you feel close to another person. But since I started touring there in 2004, I would always collaborate with local musicians, and that opened up a new level of intimacy.

I'm doing a lot of touring and things have been really busy for me.

I guess something that I've noticed from American acts who had success in touring is more of an explanation as to their music. Which is I think quite funny. I think British acts might like to leave more to the imagination - maybe a bit more obscure perhaps - a bit more shy.

I don't mind traveling that much when I can go somewhere and stay there for a while, but touring is different. You rarely see anything. You get there early in the morning and you're resting all day, and you go in and do a sound check, and you do the show, and then bam you're gone.

I have been on my own all my life except during those touring days.

Touring helped me understand where I needed to be better in my music.

A lot of the stuff I've accumulated over the last few years of touring I thought was really interesting. Like sounds, sound bites, and beats even, but they weren't good dance beats they weren't ones anyone would want to rap over or anything.

I don't like touring and it seemed to be getting on top of me in a big way.

I tend to write better when I'm not touring.

So when you start touring, women are definitely going to check you out first.

I just kept making records, touring in Europe a lot, and then I had a baby in 2006, so my life has been very, very much family-orientated.

The GTO is such an important car because it's a racing car and a touring car and that's pretty unusual.

Touring is an incredibly isolated situation. I don't know how people tour for years on end. You find a lot of people who can't stop touring, and it's because they don't know how to come back into life. It's sort of unreal.

In general, I usually don't really go by or live my life by a clock, and outside of touring, I don't really ask anyone else to. It's not out of lack of respect for anyone or intentional.

Electro is today's disco - making electronic music not for the sake of selling it but for sharing it and touring around the world D.J.-ing.

Touring is a whole other animal for me and a whole other skill. But I'm having a lot of fun figuring all that out and switching it from internal to external and putting on a show.

I started salsa dancing with a few different companies and started touring the country. It was fantastic, but I realized that I really wanted to talk every time we were performing. That's a problem because when you're dancing, if you stop to talk, that's not really cool to the other dancers.

The worst thing about touring is the travel.

Even though the popularity and the fanbase is much much greater, and more people have heard about me through things like the Grammys and the Ivors and touring and word of mouth, it doesn't reflect in the sales of the record and doesn't go into my pocket.

Touring on 'Folie' was like being the last act at the vaudeville show: We were rotten vegetable targets in clandestine hoods.

The touring part is really mixed. You love to play and you can't wait to go, but you don't want to leave.

We didn't realize there were that many boy bands until we started touring in Europe. I don't think we were ever affected by it since a lot of the groups in Europe didn't really sing live, but we did and would perform a cappella as well.

Getting on the bus and touring was my life. And when that was not around, I felt myself a bit lost at times, because that was all I had.

I'm just saying that at least for the foreseeable future there won't be any more touring

As opposed to touring for three years and then going into the studio and writing an album, I think this record is representative of a lot of everyday people.

I spent six years touring the world playing Shakespeare, Molire, Shaw, Goldsmith... But I slowly came to realise that the people you are working with are as important as the parts you play, and that there were lots of interesting people working in film and T.V.

The touring for this album was definitely going to be the most intense touring we've done.

Music is my work, writing songs is my work, touring is my work, going into the studio is my work.

When I was growing up, there was no such thing as a touring ukulele player.

Touring can be tough; the crew and I travel everywhere by a big pink bus, and live in petrol stations.

I like to travel. I love touring, I love playing.

I saw Mercury Prize-winners Alt-J for the first time recently, touring their debut album 'An Awesome Wave,' and I'm still riding the high: they're the most musically dynamic and exciting band to have poured tune into my lug holes live since Bellowhead.

My favorite part of touring is when I see girls that I've been talking to on my site and then meeting them in person. I can't believe how well the fans get along together. Everyone just seems to be really cool.

I never, ever wanted to be the Rolling Stones. Bless their hearts, but I don't necessarily want to go on doing the same old thing for the next 10, 20 years... I could see how easy it is to get into that rut, the whole touring mindset.

There hasn't been one highlight that stands out... but touring and performing has been great.

I've had a very, very interesting view of the planet over the last 30 years, touring as excessively as I have. And music is the most evocative, transformative, connective force in humanity, man.

The best part of touring is playing the shows. I mean, that is the point of touring, at least for me. I have been blessed in that I've always gotten to play with other good musicians.

After the comedy boom of the '80s, there was a certain formula that comedians had to do and could do in order to be successful touring comedians, and those were mainly observational comedians who had a very strict structure of what made an act, and I think it was very performance oriented.

I guess some of today's programming has rubbed off on me because I find myself having to set time around for touring, putting that together and then setting time around for recording.

There are nights when you can feel stale because you've fallen into a pattern by touring too much, but it's easy to get out of it by deliberately getting in trouble and playing yourself into a corner to then see if you can get out of it.

I couldn't be touring unless my husband was on the road with me, taking care of our son while I'm onstage and doing interviews.

Touring is what you make it. I like to organise as much as possible myself.

Touring a segregated America - forever being stopped and harassed by white cops hurt you most 'cos you don't realise the damage. You hold it in. You feel empty, like someone reached in and pulled out your guts. You feel hurt and dirty, less than a person.

For 'Death Magnetic,' I used what I always use, which is my standard touring rack, which is filled with some Boogie stuff and a Marshall that I've had forever.

Starting young has definitely helped my success. All the experience I gained by touring with other players as a backing artist helped to prepare me for my own big break.

I feel like I've spent the majority of my time touring and traveling, so if I reduced the actual time making music, it's probably four and a half years at the most.

The touring was crazy, it was a lot of work. But I enjoyed it.

I knew how touring was for 10 years, but it's completely different now that things are popping off.

Broadway is another monster. I've been touring since I was 12 years old and I love being on the road - one day you're here, next day it's snowing, and the next you are in a desert and it's 110 degrees. So I guess I'm kind of used to the madness physically that you go to when you are an entertainer. But it's been great.

Touring is hard. It's really hard on the singer, especially, because your body is your instrument and you have to be so good, it's like boot camp out there; I can't do anything - just sleep, sing and be very healthy.

I'd been touring for so long, seven years. For a year and a half I'd just been curious about what it was like not to tour. It's like if you were to lift a 100-pound barbell with your right arm for seven years, eventually you'd get really curious about what your left arm was capable of.

I'm not going to do any more solo touring.

I'm not a summertime guy. The only time I really enjoy the summer is touring and performing because there is nothing else for me to do at home. It's too hot, and you can't farm. You can't hunt.

I had kids at age 47, and very late in life, and I'd been doing it for 30 straight years, writing songs, making a record and touring and starting the process right over.

When I finished touring 'Fur and Gold,' I was just like, 'What am I doing? What do I have? Where is my home?' I didn't really know where it was, so I went to New York to try and make it there.

Let me tell you something - compared to a TV-drama production schedule, touring is not strenuous.

Touring, and being in a band, it's almost like the other stuff, the other parts of life, get put on hold.

My touring has never stopped; from the time I started doing stand-up, I've been on the road.

I remember having to quit school and quit my job. I just sort of moved all my stuff into other people's places. Within, like, six months, I was able to earn enough money from touring to rent a place again.

I think comics in New York are interested in being comics. And there're comics in L.A. who are touring comics, who are certainly more interested in stand-up, but a lot of L.A. stand-ups are really looking to do something else.

Whereas for me, touring tends to be a very strange and isolating experience.

I'll be like Bob Hope, touring when I'm 100.

One of the coolest things about touring around, actually, is getting to meet people, and getting to pick up on things that other people like. So many times, people come up to me after a reading and say, 'You must have read this,' or 'You must have seen this,' or 'Do you listen to this?' Usually I haven't.

Poor old Paul. He's getting it in the neck from Bono while he's touring up in Canada and he's getting it in the teeth from me,

Numerous recordings of non-Western music are readily available, and live performances by touring groups can be heard even in our smaller cities.

I did quite a lot of menial jobs. I was a waiter, an inventory clerk touring round properties listing cups and saucers, and a laserquest marshal.

If we can find a couple hundred new fans for some of these touring artists working on grass roots fan bases, that's part of our mission: to expose the stars to our market. We're taking a look at some interesting stuff that's local to Wisconsin, but could be the next big thing out of Wisconsin.

Since we've been touring the last four months or so, the crowd always jumps to it like it's a single or something, even though it never was a single. So it seemed like the obvious choice.

We had been touring for about two years, so our minds were in tour mode, definitely. We thought we had done it and changed over to a studio mind, and we started to do the writing and recording and stuff, and we realized that you know what, no, we're not ready, actually. So we had to step back and really just get centered and get focused and ready to do it.

Touring is really a pretty lonely business.

King Crimson will soon be touring parts of Europe.

I felt I had almost written myself into a corner. You could say I'd rewritten the same novel three times and I thought I had to move on. The success of the book, and then the movie, had by then also created a commercial expectation and I remember touring America and seeing people in the audiences who I thought might not want to read the books I wanted to write next. My constituency had become broader, but more mysterious to me.

I announced last year that I won't be touring again. But CBS has given me the opportunity to take my music to the people in a new way, to have the fun of performing live, and to do it in such a way that I don't have to be away from home for long periods of time. It's going to be fun.

But it was moving so fast that we didn't have time to dwell upon it, we went from an opening act to headlining, and we were out touring a long time.

I felt frustrated by the limitations of rock and the lifestyle of touring around on a bus and playing the same songs over and over. So I went back to school to study music, and one of the things I got into was the Italian opera composer Puccini.

I had just basically gotten tired of working, touring on the road with a vocalist and the whole process of doing vocal oriented music.

He definitely challenged us being, when he came in, he was the most experienced out of all of us as far as touring and as far as the amount of bands he'd been in and stuff. So when he came in, he kind of helped shape us up when we were putting out a whole bunch of ideas. And he definitely kept us on our toes in a lot of ways. In the three months that we knew each other, he became one of, all of us, he became one of our best friends. He was just an amazing character.

I am having fun being an artist, and I'm looking forward to touring with my band, and playing the new and old songs live.

He had a lively way of living and enjoyed every moment. He made touring fun. There was never a dull moment, with jokes and a lot of laughs.

We've been touring over two years now and tour about eight months out of the year. After we hit Brookings, we're going back to Texas to restock and rest for a little,

He figured there had to be a better way, and went to the drawing board and came up with a wrecker; that's what they called them back then. He took a 1913 Cadillac touring car and cut the back out to make the first tow truck. He got a patent for it.

Just spent the day discussing touring up through next summer, then played our asses off to the least responsive audience I can ever remember playing to. As I'm walking to the bus to leave Sacramento as soon as I can, I learn Jerome is back in the hospital. I have no idea what this means.

I was amused to read that they've actually put together a marketing plan, which said I would be touring extensively in the spring. So how was I?

Our regional success was helpful when we broke nationally, because we'd laid the foundations and were used to being on television and performing live. We did it the old-fashioned way, and built our fan base through stopping by radio stations to promote our albums and touring extensively.