Gentleman Auction House Tour Diary // The Riverfront Times

When Gentleman Auction House set out on a short summer tour in June of 2008, Annie Zaleski, the music editor for the RFT, asked if I would be willing to write a daily tour diary entry for the RFT’s online music blog. Flattered, I enthusiastically agreed, unaware of just how daunting a task a keeping a tour diary is. It’s doubly-daunting (!) when your record label and PR rep emphatically request you that you keep a tour diary on the band’s blog as well, with as little content overlap as possible.

So, I spread what little content I had around as much as possible, sending most of the writing to the RFT, and reserving most of the imagery (courtesies of my trusty Canon PowerShot) for the band blog. To add a little something extra to both tour diaries, I implemented recurring novelties such as “Plaid Of The Day”, “MVP Of The Day”, and “Seven Objects That Represent The Members Of Our Band” on the band blog, while the RFT tour diary featured coloring-book-style line renderings I made of each venue, colored in with crayon by my band member, Stephen Tomko (I highly recommend noting his crayon-scrawled commentary on each image below, as it is both ridiculous and amazing).

I quickly realized generating all this was going to take up most of my time on the road, as rarely was I not taking a picture, working on a graphic, or cranking out copy. But, I stuck with it and churned out an entry each day. In hindsight, it’s really cool to have this document of that tour, and it makes me wish I had done some similar, albeit much shorter, blogging for our other tours.