New Underoath drummer Daniel Davison tour blog

Welp, its been a month to the day since my last update. (Forgive me for the delay!)  A lot of happened since then…
We finished up the recording of the new record.  We are all completely stoked with how everything turned out with it.  Overall if was a wonderful experience.

I really enjoyed working with Matt Goldman, whom I've been friends with for years, but never actually recorded a full record with.  He and Jeremy Griffith (who co-produced the record) were are great team, I think they both killed it on this record.
I can't wait to share this record with everyone.  I think its a great step forward for Underoath, and even though I am playing with them now, I feel like I can have some sort of an outside opinion when listening to the record, and comparing it to their previous efforts.  It is surely my favorite Underoath material to date.
We're hoping that it will be released in late October.  (We've been working hard on finalizing the song titles and album title… I think we'll release that soon.)

As soon as we finished the record (In Atlanta), we drove down to Tampa, where we had one day off before starting out on the Cool Tour.

The next day, we all made our way up to the House of Blues in Orlando for the pre-production day for the tour.  This day basically consisted of a whole bunch of standing around and waiting… we were there to do our single sound check for the entire tour, but just as James had called several days ago, we did not get to do our sound check at all.  Bump.  (We ended up having to get up and sound check at 9:30am the following day.  Earliest sound check I've ever done.)

The show that night, which was the first of the tour (and my first show with Underoath) was to a packed house, including all of the UØ family and friends.  I was super nervous, and very excited.  The show went off without a hitch, at least to the crowd of people who were singing along and going crazy.   Little did they know that behind the scenes, there were more technical difficulties than one would ever expect, ha.  Too many to explain here, but it doesn't really matter anyway.  The first show was a success.  I was stoked to now have one show under my belt, I felt really good about it.

Over the next week we rolled up the East coast.  We passed through my hometown of Atlanta, where we played the Tabernacle, which was really exciting for me.  I've seen everyone from Bob Dylan to the Deftones there… and I had always wanted to play there.  It ruled.  My mom came out to the show… probably the most excited person at the show, ha.  She is really happy to see me playing music again.

We continued up the coast, playing shows everyday.  Had a great show/hangtime in Toronto… it was one of the best shows of the tour so far.
We spent our first day off in Scranton, PA.  Spent the day at the pool, at the movies (saw Inception, which was amazing!), and at the hot tub.
Grant bet Chris $100 that he couldn't stay underwater in the pool for an hour, breathing through a snorkel.
To most everyones surprise, Chris pulled through and actually did it!  ha!

From Scranton, we headed up into New England.
I did a photo shoot for a mustache calendar while we were in Boston, ha.  Hopefully I'll have some photos to post from that shoot, soon.
The Boston, Jersey, Philly, and Columbus, OH shows were all incredible.

This brings us up to date…
The Cool Tour is now half over, and I'm now 11 shows into playing with Underoath.   I definitely feel like I'm in the groove of things now.  Each night continues get better than the last.  And we're finally at the point where everyone on the tour is finally hanging out.
I've really enjoyed getting to know the guys from Cancer Bats and Architects.  Great bands, and super good dudes.  I feel like I am going to come out of this tour having made some lifelong friends.
The guys from Architects have had van trouble from day 1 of the tour, so a couple of them have been riding on our bus every night.  Its been really good times.  Super late night dance parties in the front lounge of the bus have become a nightly occurrence.

It had been about 2.5 years since I had really been on tour, and only now have I realized how much I had missed it.  It feels great to be playing music every night again.  It really is so much fun.
This tour is flying by… so I'll try to be better about giving updates!
Thanks for supporting music.
I hope you are all well!