Road Report: The Antlers Examine the Circle of Tour

The Antlers began as singer/guitarist Peter Silberman's solo project, but soon became a trio after the addition of Michael Lerner and Darby Cicci. The band recorded two EPs, 'Cold War' and 'New York Hospitals,' before releasing their full-length album 'Hospice.'

The Brooklyn-based group is currently on tour with Phantogram, in support of their remastered LP on Frenchkiss, and working on a new album in between. The band will be checking in from the road with their personal stories and reflections, beginning with this first entry from Silberman, where he talks about being home vs. being on tour.

Home & Gone
Travel isn't complicated, really. You have home (in my case, Brooklyn), and everything outside of home. When you've got a home, travel is circular. We leave Brooklyn, fly across the Atlantic Ocean to the U.K., travel within the U.K., maybe to countries in Europe, and gradually circle our way back home to Brooklyn, attempting to avoid retracing our steps too much. This tour will work the same way.

We've been home for a little over three weeks, and we began this trip a few days ago by driving out from there to Columbus, Ohio. We'll route gradually north to Minneapolis (where I'm writing from now), with stops along the way in Illinois and Wisconsin. After this, we'll weave around the rest of the Midwest and eventually shoot toward the West Coast and then north to the top. When we reach the top, we'll fly home.

This is the circle, and though the diameter, circumference, and symmetry may change from tour to tour, it's always a circle. When we're home, the circle is smaller, but still a circle. I have a bed and a a home, leave the house for some reason (coffee, people, dinner, etc), and eventually circle back. If this has stopped making sense, I apologize, but this circle is the only way I'll be able to convince you (and myself) that living on tour and living in one place are similar, because in most ways, they're not.

A crucial difference is familiarity. Home is familiar and tour is not. This much is fairly obvious. I know people at home, I know street names and the names of places open after midnight. I know where friends go to work and the address of "that park" (well maybe not the address, but I could tell you which train to take to get there). On tour, I don't know anything. I don't know shortcuts and I don't know the name of the quiet street parallel to the louder main street. On tour, everything is new until it all begins to look the same. When it begins to look the same, you learn what to avoid (fast food disguised as real food), and what to seek out (certain motels, state-dependent liquor-law hours).

These small new-found familiarities turn new cities into something less daunting and alienating. You come to understand the basic qualities of any place, and the differences tend to live in character, things that serve to make each city memorable (unless it's just not, and I'd be lying if I claimed every city is memorable). Chicago has that concrete walkway along Lake Michigan, and Brighton has those charred, rusty remains of a pier that caught fire and collapsed years ago, and so on. These landmarks are important- they transform "gone" into "home." I've started to make the same circles while I'm gone as when I'm home. The familiar neighborhood in San Francisco is my coffee place in Brooklyn, the familiar record store in Cincinnati is where I buy batteries in Manhattan. Ultimately, I return home from all of these places. The scale may be greater but the shape is the same.