Successful Touring Begs The Question
After a couple stressful months of finishing Once A Pawn’s new album ‘In This House,’ and touring out to the East Coast, it’s been a total success. Once A Pawn had a great album release on Oct. 1, and if you didn’t make it out or haven’t picked up a new disc yet...no fear! You can either make it to one of our upcoming shows or download the album on iTunes.
Out on tour earlier this month, Once A Pawn played shows in Rhode Island, New York and West Virginia. We were out for nearly two weeks, including the full days of driving straight through the eastern side of the U.S. Our goal was to get to the coast as quick as possible. After years of touring throughout the country, we’ve learned a valuable lesson--the East and West coasts are where it’s at. We came to this conclusion not only because of the awesome people we’ve met on the coasts, but because it’s there that we feel genuinely appreciated for the music we make.
The music scene right now is tough place to be no matter where you are, who you are or what kind of music you play. Although at times it’s hard not to wonder if being a non-trendy queer-fronted rock band in the Midwest makes things even a little more trying for Once A Pawn. We have a loyal and supportive fan base here in Nebraska that we feel very fortunate to have, but the immediate response we’ve gotten from people while playing shows on both coasts has been amazing. Not only has it been great to make a name for ourselves in these bigger cities, but it’s been awesome meeting other like-minded queer musicians and having our music be appreciated by the queer community. Slowly, more and more of Nebraska’s queer community is finding out about their local queer band, but unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be much of a place for live music in the queer scene here.
I’ve found it very interesting how C Styles, my drag persona, and my drag king boi band, CRUSH, can pack the house for our shows, but trying to get a quarter of the amount of people to catch a Once A Pawn show is as difficult as trying to take a superglued earring off a drag queen. Maybe it’s just the accessibility of the type of music and entertainment a drag show offers that makes it more attractive than listening to the original music of a live band? Or maybe a drag show just feels the most comfortable out of the two? I’ll just never know exactly what it is because I genuinely enjoy both.
Anyhow, I would like to seriously thank the people in the community that support my band, Once A Pawn. It means the world to us, and you help us continue to do what we love to do--make music.
Catherine Balta
aka C Styles
Lead Vocalist & Drummer, Once A Pawn
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