MUSIC

reg Obis’s band Stuck plotted a fourdate east-coast run in December 2021.

Omicron was fast becoming the dominant U.S. COVID variant when Stuck arrived in Cleveland to play Now That’s Class on December 16. The other two bands on the bill canceled—they shared a member who’d tested positive. “So we played an hour set,” Obis says. “I don’t think anyone wants to hear an hour of

Obis spent that night doomscrolling and struggling to decide what to do about the rest of their tour. “We drove from Cleveland to Pittsburgh,” he says, “and then had a ‘come to Jesus’ moment and turned the car

The threat of COVID is all but impossible for touring musicians to guard against—by its nature, the virus requires wide cooperation to bring it under control, and in the States most people have abandoned mitigation e orts entirely. When artists travel for weeks at a time, play lots of indoor venues where few if any fans wear masks, and bunk at strangers’ houses on short notice, the risk factors are almost too numerous to count.

Touring artists can’t do much to plan for the possibility of getting sick either. If you test positive on the road, the best option is to cut your losses and return home—especially if your tour isn’t long enough for the disease to run its course before your last date. That’s what Ganser did when Cundiff and guitarist Charlie Landsman tested positive on a threeshow run with Algiers.

“We had to drive all the way back, straight from New Orleans,” Cundiff says. “Basically, we had the van’s windows down so Nadia [Garofalo] and Alicia [Gaines] wouldn’t get what we had. Luckily they didn’t—but that was pretty rough. That was an extra expense.”

COVID also struck Viets-VanLear’s fourplus-week tour with Nilüfer Yanya. They postponed two Canadian shows after a

Half Gringa scheduled a ten-date fullband run in October 2022, but doubt set in partway through the tour. “After about seven shows, turnout was not so great,” Olive says. “I started to think—I’m self-managed—from a manager’s perspective, ‘Does it make sense to do the last four dates of this tour?’” She’d played in some of the same cities in fall 2021, and ticket sales were lagging behind those shows.

Ordinary tour costs (gas, food) had increased as well. In October 2022, the Wall Street Journal reported that consumer prices had risen almost 8 percent from the year before. “I thought, ‘Maybe it doesn’t make sense to come up here,’” Olive says. “Even some of the talent buyers who booked those shows were saying the same thing. They were not mean about it. They were like, ‘Hey, it’s a really tough time, these kinds of shows aren’t doing super well. Maybe you should save the gas money and come back another time.’” She canceled the remaining gigs, and the band returned to Chicago.

“It was a bummer,” Olive says. “Luckily, everybody that I had in the full band was really understanding and kind about it and very empathetic. We all have other jobs outside of this, and it didn’t put anybody out severely. But it was like, ‘I can’t lose more money. I won’t be able to make another record in the manner that I want to, or in the time frame that I want to, if I lose all this member of Yanya’s crew tested positive in New York. Viets-VanLear and her band drove back to Chicago, planning to rendezvous with Yanya when the tour resumed. But then one of Viets-VanLear’s bandmates was exposed to COVID, eventually testing positive. Her group played the last seven dates with Yanya (and two headlining shows) as a trio.

“We changed the set list and played arrangements that would work for three people,” she says. “It was fine, but it also wasn’t what I practiced. It wasn’t what I wanted to do with these shows, which were in bigger rooms than I’d ever played before.”

The rest of the tour took them west, which meant much longer drives with only three people to share the wheel instead of four. “It was a constant reckoning,” says Viets-VanLear. “Like, ‘This is a beautiful opportunity. I love music, I love my job, I love getting to do this.’ And also, ‘This is so hard.’ Like really, honestly, waiting for it to be over.” money on tour.’”

Touring today inarguably involves financial and health risks that it didn’t just a few years ago. These new realities, and the compromises necessary to accommodate them, can test any musician’s resolve. Viets-VanLear’s tour last year made her question what she wants out of the industry, and it’s been a balm to her to spend time at home, writing and reminding herself what she loves about music.

Withdrawing from touring and recentering herself, says Viets-VanLear, helps her maintain her conviction that the music business is where she belongs. “I am able to believe that and buy into it a little more,” she says. “Which I think is necessary if I want to keep doing this silly little job.”