Hey Hey In Rockers and Welcome to The Lobby for this month’s romp through the daily doings of a guy in a touring rock band, and we are doing a whole bunch of touring right now! Goo Goo Dolls are 1 week into our 2022 Summer Tour of North America with Alt Rockers Blue October opening the show. This tour which was booked for our “Miracle Pill” album cycle was originally booked in 2019 (also included in those dates were yet to be rescheduled Asian dates) and the trip was rescheduled twice due to the Covid 19 outbreak in 2020. Some folks have been waiting literally 3 years since buying their tickets to catch the show, and this time we have a new album out to promote! So, with the release of a new single called “Yeah I Like You” on July 5th and the release of our brand-new album “Chaos in Bloom” on Warner Records worldwide on August 12th, we begin a new project cycle and have a bunch of exciting new songs to share with all of you.

The tour started with just the band and a small staff in pre-production rehearsals in Los Angeles, we had a bunch of new songs to learn, worked on some rearrangements and surprises to be added to the set in a small rehearsal room while band members and crew were coming and going due to covid infections. It was really an intense month all said, but we made it through the first round of rehearsals and headed out to the desert in Palm Springs, CA to set up the entire rock show with video, sound, and lights for rehearsals with the entire 23 person touring crew.

In the desert we reviewed video content for the large LED screens on the stage, we try to use new images every tour, our lighting director brought us a ton of new content to use for the songs and we discussed and inserted them into the show. After 30+ years of releasing music and 14 studio albums it’s become a challenge over time to put a set together, so many songs and so little time, but after selecting the songs we were to perform on night #1 of the tour we ran through the set, checked the cues for the songs, went over the instrument changes and the rest of the technical details needed on the stage to make a great rock show.

Night #1 of the tour was a scorcher, nearly 100 degrees Fahrenheit when we made it to the stage in Boise, Idaho, (but it was probably 10 degrees cooler than when openers Blue October took the stage, yikes!) but as the sun went down and the music took hold of the audience, we knew we were off and running! And after all the preparation and travel, the first show was great, we then traveled in our tour bus to Bend, Oregon and Missoula, Montana for more shows as the tour continued its first sweaty week in front of some super enthusiastic crowds!

After the Missoula, MT show we had a private event in Las Vegas to perform at so we traveled by chartered jet to Las Vegas right after the show and here I sit in my room typing our monthly catch up here in the pages of The Mighty In Rock. We have 46 more shows on this run before we leave for another small 3-week theater run in the US before the holidays. Hope you are all keeping cool out there, my wife and daughter are spending the Summer in my wife’s hometown in Japan and are coming to join me in August for a little while on the tour. Can’t wait to see them, that’s one of the worst parts of touring, being away from the ones you love. But I will see them soon and in the meantime, we’ve got a whole bunch of rock shows to do before then!

All the best to you this Summer and after another couple dozen GGD shows here in the US, I look forward to talking with you next month here in the pages of The Mighty InRock.

Peace

Robby