The Cattle Tour, 2024
We're back like Kerouac
It is hot. For our west coast and international friends, in case you haven’t heard enough bitching from your loved ones here on the eastern seaboard of the continental United States, it’s been hot. Dangerously hot. Something’s-wrong-and-probably-ain’t-getting-no-better hot.
But it is through this oppressive heat1 that I type out this humble newsletter for you, dear reader! Because our time together is worth the buckets of sweat, for our time is short but sweet for certain. So let us make haste and dive into the world of Gooseberry, shall we?
Died and Met You
Two weeks ago, we released Dying To Meet You. You can read all about that tune here. The response so far has been incredible! Under The Radar and ChorusFM premiered the song with incredibly kind write ups. Most importantly, y’all have been streaming and saving and sharing the song and it’s already got 5K+ streams on Spotify and 10K+ views on YouTube. That’s a heck of a lot of activity in just the first two weeks. Excited to see where y’all take this song from here.
An Album!
Last week, we shared the artwork for our upcoming album, All My Friends Are Cattle.
Sharing this album—our debut album—with the world is a bit surreal. We’ve been a band now for something like 4 years or so. I consider the band to have really begun in May 2021 when we were finally able to perform live amidst the pandemic,2 so after a handful of singles and two EPs, it’s something approaching catharsis to say we have finally delivered a full length record to the world. And beyond that, a record we love. I mean really love. We chiseled this marble from many songs left chipped on the floor. You’ve already met two of the ten (Kikiyon, Dying To Meet You). We cannot wait for you to hear the remaining eight.
It’s Tour Time
Last Friday, we announced our 2024 summer tour! It rhymes! It begins five weeks from today. You should come.
For those who remember The Validation Tour countdown last summer, we got numerical with it. So we thought, why not revisit that post and update it for The Cattle Tour 2024? The people crave numbers!!
25
Shows we’ll be playing on this edition of the summer tour. That is one (1) more than last year.
And yes, I recognize that the poster only shows 23.
First off: good eye.
Second off: shut UP, nerd!!
Third off: in your defense, yes, the poster only has 23 shows because there are two secret shows we can’t tell you about just yet. So, shhhhh. I promise when we can share info about those, it will all have been worth it.
For the Gazetters, I’ll give a couple clues:
We’re opening up for someone
They’re a member of arguably the biggest band ever to exist
We think they’re a lot of fun
Guesses in the comments will be entertained…
44
Total days for the tour, once more meaning that we’ll be playing shows more days than not playing shows. 56.8% of the days, to be exact.
Prayers up for my vocal cords.3
15
Cities we’ll be playing for the first time, even considering we’re playing some of the 13 new ones from last summer! Cleveland, Detroit, and Chicago made the Midwest so welcoming that we decided we simply had to dig deeper into the heartland.
We’ve got two stops each in Iowa, Missouri, and Wisconsin. We’ll also be stepping back into the South—my old and now new home—hitting two stops in Tennessee and North Carolina as well.
Pumped to play Nashville as a band for the first time, and at the legendary Basement no less, but my sleeper picks?
8/3 in Burlington, VT at Red Square
8/17 in Madison, WI at The Bur Oak
8/22 in Knoxville, TN at Barley’s Taproom
No one gets down like a college town. Book it.
BONUS: 15 is also the number of unique states we’ll play this summer. That’s 30% of all of them if my math serves me well…
2
Number of 20+ date summer tours this band will have under its belt. Honestly, that’s two more than we thought we’d have back in 2020.
Last summer, we proved we could do this. It’s grueling and frustrating and requires immense coordination across multiple parties, all for the sweet reward of potentially breaking even.4 But when it all comes together, the end product is sharing our music with all of you, the people who make this possible. And that is worth all the effort and then some.
Quite literally, we cannot do this without you. Without your support, coming to shows, buying merch, singing the words, sharing with friends, we’d never leave Greenpoint5
We say it a lot. We’ll never stop saying it. Thanks for being here. Yes, you. You even read all the way to the bottom. You are for the mission. And that mission begins August 1st in Boston.
See y’all there <3
A perfectly cool 70 degrees courtesy of central air conditioning within my abode
And in typical pandemic fashion, we played this show at the Bowery Electric with shields of plastic set up around tables as a “preventative measure” as though the audience wasn’t going to get up and dance by the stage in the end. We all collectively lost our minds for a couple years there, didn’t we?
Not to play the blame game here, but… I blew out my voice like 4 shows into the last tour so clearly someone wasn’t praying hard enough OR your prayers are being actively ignored. Either way, you should speak to someone about that (my voice recovered, it was all fine, fear not, salvation will be ours)
Rock and roll does not pay like it used to, folks. But hey, at least someone is getting paid.
Greenpoint is real nice though so maybe we’ve played ourselves…
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