All is Found

37

Touring Europe is such a different beast from touring around America. This is my third time around in Europe and I forgot how different it was. The one thing that I majorly forgot how much I hated is the different outlets in every European country. I have blown so many fuses and chargers over the past month the next time I come to tour Europe I'm buying them in bulk to bring with me.

             This tour has been quick. The shows are so stacked were we don't have many complete off days. Most of our off days have been travel days. The few off days we do have, we have gone out to make the most of our time in Europe. We have been sight-seeing, shopping and have done a lot of eating. During our time off we have basically done everything as a group. The one thing I love about Europe is that I don't get recognized here easily. I have had some pretty good success here to headline a small tour myself but most of the days we were able to go out and do whatever we wanted without being noticed.

            Ashley had a lot of press to do here in Europe so we didn't get to see each other as often. During our time here Alyssa and the label had set up some press for myself to do as well. Not a lot, just about one in every country we stopped at for me to start to get my toes wet again. Even though I still didn't want to have meet and greets with fans yet, I have been having little meet ups in a few stops. Usually they were outside the venue before I went I did sound check. I got to hang out with the fans for a little, take some selfies, sign some autographs maybe sing a song for them if I had enough time.

            Before we started going out for shows, Alyssa and I had a lot of work to do. She floated me the idea to start making music videos for some of my more successful songs that I have out now and that took up a lot of our time during the first week of our time here in Europe. We started with My Heart because I knew I just wanted to use the footage from one of my shows in the states. I watched at least 15 different videos of the song and I ended up using the video from the show of Ashers' birthday. I was emotional and you could see it during the performance and when my voice cut out the crowd picked it right up. When I sing the song live I always overlay Asher's vocals during the song.

            So once I picked the performance I wanted to use, I scoured my laptop and found old pictures and videos of Asher and I. Then I found a video saved deep in my cloud from the day Asher recorded himself. I had the video designer piece together the video of Asher singing with me right beside him. The final product made me cry so hard it took a phone call with Thea to get me to stop. When we watched it back it almost felt like he was on stage singing the song with me.

            Tell Her You Love Her kind of became a pride anthem overnight. Suddenly it blew up towards the end of June as we were leaving for Europe and Alyssa wanted me to capitalize on the success. We found out that there was a pride parade going on in Madrid so Nikki, Alyssa and myself went. The video was basically of our time at pride, the floats, dancers, all kinds of couples and in a few spots of the song we added video of me singing to Thea during the Boston show and a few different pictures and videos of Thea and I.

            We haven't put out any other videos right now because of tour but we have planned out shooting a few more when we get home. Alyssa said that the label has given her an offer to present to me for one full length album with a major headline tour across the states, South America, Europe and possibly Asia if it does well there. I haven't given them an answer about it yet because I want to have an official offer and have Jack go over it.

            Touring with a packed schedule is not ideal. Alyssa has been great with making sure we have an off day every once and a while but I'm breaking down. It has been hard for me to have therapy sessions with Doctor Blake while overseas because of the time difference and I've been needing them now more than ever. My nightmares have come back in full force and they are slowly driving me insane. The first week here in Europe they weren't too bad. I was able to wake myself up from them and be okay.