I did an interview earlier this week with Kyle Cunningham - from A&M's Battalion magazine. Kyle and I met earlier this fall when I performed with Laura Meyer at Stafford on Main (Bryan, TX). The interview was a pleasure...he asked great questions, and, and expected - did a spectacular job summing up the inspiration and ideas behind this tour with Chloe.
Probably the most poignant description of the tour concept so far...my sincere thanks to Kyle, Stevo Schlemmer and everyone in the Bryan/College Station area!
You can read the full article here, or check out the text below:
Being on the road is tough. There's the loneliness factor of leaving everything you own and love behind to play show after show; but when everything is finished, you can still return to those things and people.
Some people aren't so lucky, which is why musician Aly Tadros is hitting the road on a tour of the Midwest and southeast, stopping in Bryan for a 9 p.m. show today at The Village.
For the last few years, Tadros has dedicated herself to two projects: music and non-profit work. In Austin, Tadros worked with a group called Care Communities.
Care Communities is a non-profit organization formed in 1991 to provide daily care and help for those with serious illnesses like cancer, HIV and AIDS. Tadros worked with a patient named Anna, and what started as a volunteer assignment grew into more.
"Anna needed rides to acupuncture and just wanted someone to hang out with her," Tadros said. "I ended up spending a lot of time playing music for her. We just became really, really good friends and I loved it so much. She was such a huge inspiration for me."
After Anna passed, Aly released her album Things Worth Keeping and started touring, but something kept tugging at Tadros while she was on the road.
"I felt restless, I wanted to be doing more and there was a part of me that felt that I should be volunteering or contributing my time somehow because I get so much from it in an altruistic way," Tadros said. "I didn't want to do music if it was all me all the time. I mean, you say it's for the fans and you want to share your music and music helps people, but a lot of time it feels like you're spending three hours a day on Facebook promoting shows because it's all about you."
Tadros' research on what she could do with her music to benefit more people than just regular fans, led her to discover Musicians on Call, a group that plays for hospitalized people.
The Musicians on Call model pushed Tadros towards the style of tour she is doing now – performing for those in retirement centers, assisted living homes and at The Arc, a foundation for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities.
Her tour-mate, Chloe Charles, wasn't told about this until the middle of their first tour together, back in the summer.
"We were in Europe and the same feeling kicked up and I was thinking, ‘What am I doing this all for?'" Tadros said. "You know you're working towards something bigger, but it still felt like a selfish sort of thing – sell my merchandise and pay my bills. During the second week of the tour I was feeling really depressed."
This led to Tadros asking Charles to do this tour – just a plan back then – which Charles supported.
Six stops on the tour will be for those in assisted living, retirement communities or various Arc locations.
The entire tour will take place as Tadros takes an online class for lyric writing, which she said takes up multiple hours of her day.
"You're learning all of the clinical, intellectual sides of analyzing and putting together songs," Tadros said.
As the learning process continues for Tadros, she only hopes that she can give as much to the world with her music as she can take in.
