116 Days of Summer Guests: NeoRomantics
For this series of summer guest posts, I would usually give the band or solo artist a list of topics or one very broad topic. The NeoRomantics of Tulsa, Oklahoma chose to tell me about their bucket list. It’s like a combination of my favorite things — music and bucket lists. This reminds me that I should find my list again . . .
Keep reading to find out what the NeoRomantics have to say. I appreciate them for taking time out of their busy schedule to be my guest.
Bucket List:
–Write records that resonate with our listeners.
-Sell out Cain’s Ballroom, in our hometown.
-Tour in all 48 states in the continental U.S.
-Tour Internationally, North America first, then Europe, Australia, Brazil, and Japan eventually.
-Tour with our favorite bands.
-Make a career out of playing music.
-Make as many friends as possible at home, as well as all across the globe.
This prompt was rather difficult for us to think about. On one hand, we’re an ambitious group and have never let anything get the best of us. Personally, When things would come up in the history of this band, Anthony would step up and learn how to tackle it to make sure we could move forward and keep truckin’ along. So the idea of having a bucket list meant we have new things to tackle. For example, we wanted to tour lighter and more efficiently, which meant ditching a trailer. Hagen, our vocalist literally learned how to play guitar and bought great gear and moved us in the direction we are now so we could tour in a van without a trailer.
Now, we sat down as a band after we received this and really had to think about the future, where we see ourselves in a few years and what we wanted to tackle. First things first, we want to hit every state in the continental US. we’ve hit quite a few, mostly in the Midwest and east coast but the west coast is next to tackle. After that, touring internationally is the next step. I’ve personally only gone out of the country once but playing a show out of the country would be otherworldly for me.
A vast amount of our goals surround the touring aspect of being a band. We LOVE touring with friends, and friends bands we think are really killing in their respective scenes. We’ve grown our family from touring already, and part of that is due to us being relentlessly caring towards new friends. I feel like as soon as we get to a new state or city we’ve never played, it’s my personal mission to leave knowing at least 5 new friends by name, and making sure they’re loved and cared for. When you’re on the road playing a new city, it’s too easy to get into a mindset that no one cares about you when you’re there, or you’re super alone in a big city, but if you give people a reason to extend their friendship to you, it goes a long way.
We want to keep building our family at home. This band started super organically. We all kind of ran into each other in each version of this band and regardless of lineup changes, we’ve always been a family. Fans and bandmates alike, we’d love to continue growing our family at home.
While we have a ton of friends and fans in Tulsa, it’s a fairly large city and we know for sure that we haven’t talked to them all yet. It’s a process. There are still people here that don’t even know how strong our music scene really is, and being an advocate of that and helping our area know that it exists will make sure it organically grows as large as possible. I think for us guys that were born and raised here, selling out the Cain’s Ballroom (a 1700 cap) venue would be an indicator that our heart for other people and our hard work as a band would continually be worth it.
At the end of it all, the whole bucket list kind of resonates around writing wholesome records. Not wholesome in the sense of being like family friendly or easy to listen to, but writing songs that are raw, honest and what we’re all going through at that time. We’ve grown so much as a band writing this newest release. It’s new to us, it’s radically different from our previous departure and our growth as a band is absolutely due to us learning each other and what we all want or need at that point in time. There are bands like Emery and Paramore that have continued evolving their sound as they’ve gotten older, and their fans have gotten older as well and it’s everything that they’ve needed in that certain moment. The key to knocking out this bucket list is being brutally honest with ourselves, and our fans and family and never just doing the same thing over again. I’m stoked for the future.
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Originally published at chasingdestino.com on June 19, 2018.
