TOURING The great GAMBLE

By LEOR GALIL

Elijah Montez launched his psychpop project, Daydream Review, after moving to Chicago from Austin in 2018. He put together a band to play his material live, and they planned their first tour for March 2020. We all know what happened next. “It kind of derailed where we were at,” Montez says. “We were playing a lot of shows in 2019, leading right up to the pandemic.”

After U.S. clubs reopened in 2021, Montez plotted the tours that would actually be Daydream Review’s first: a week in the south in May 2022, then nine dates in August to the east coast and back. “It’s really financially taxing,” Montez says. “Probably the most fi- nancially taxing thing I’ve ever done.”

Daydream Review didn’t have a booking agent, so Montez did the work himself. His live band has six members, including himself, which meant he had to rent a van, which set him back a couple thousand dollars. The cost of gas also took a financial toll—the group’s first road show was May 15, a month before the national average gas price hit its record high of $5.02 per gallon. The band also had to pay for cheap hotels on four nights, since Montez had only been able to line up a few houses where the band could crash for free. That added $100 to $130 per night.

Montez had heard horror stories of bands getting robbed of their gear on the road, so Daydream Review moved all their stuff into those hotel rooms overnight. “We would literally unpack everything from the car, take it up to the room, and immediately go to sleep,” he says. “It’s exhausting taking that much gear in and out of a hotel.”

Even before the pandemic, it was hard for upstart bands to draw crowds in cities they’d never played—and Daydream Review faced their share of empty rooms on the road. Montez loved making new fans in unfamiliar places, but poor turnout hurt the band’s already ailing bottom line. It didn’t help when the promoter at Small’s Bar in Detroit canceled their show due to an emergency.

These variables make touring feel like a gamble to Montez. “It’s this touch-and-go kind of thing right now that’s really di cult to navigate,” he says. “Unless you have some sort of mysterious benefactor, I can’t really see someone doing it a lot. Unless they’re happy to not have a ton of money when they get back home.”

The current conventional wisdom about the music economy is that touring is where the money is. Now that streaming has destroyed most artists’ ability to earn meaningful income from recordings, they’re supposed to hit the road and hope they can get close to a living wage that way. Never mind that some musicians simply don’t have a live show or