News
Spanish Love Songs have announced their first headlining U.S. tour for this spring. It will follow their current tour, supporting The Wonder Years, and will kick off on April 16 in Minneapolis, MN and will wrap up about a month later on May 13 in Portland, OR. The tour will be supported by Future Teens + Dollar Sign. Tickets will be on sale this Friday, February 28.
The forthcoming tour will be in support of the band's recently released record, Brave Faces Everyone, released earlier this month. The ten-track album, produced by guitarist Kyle McAulay at Howard Benson's West Valley Recording, is steeped in the same detail-rich storytelling of Bruce Springsteen, The Menzingers and Manchester Orchestra. These songs represent the situations Slocum, McAulay, and their bandmates bassist Trevor Dietrich, drummer Ruben Duarte and keyboardist Meredith Van Woert experienced during 30-some weeks of rigorous touring during the album cycle of their previous record, Schmaltz.
Over the past six years, Spanish Love Songs have released two albums and an EP. With Brave Faces Everyone, the songs are character stories set in small-town America and anxious urban jungles alike, unfurling heartbreaking tales of addiction, depression, debt and death juxtaposed alongside looming societal bogeys like mass shootings, the opioid epidemic and climate change. They're all at once personal vignettes and universal truths of life in the 2010s, the lines blurred between Slocum's own experiences and those of his friends and acquaintances. It seeks to find balance between realism and optimism.
"If you sing something loud enough and long enough," Slocum muses, "hopefully people are able to find some peace in that." Brave Faces Everyone experiments with more traditional song structures and fewer forwardly caustic moments this time around haven't dulled the band's sound. If anything, they've accentuated the most important parts of it. When everything is loud and urgent, nothing is. But when Slocum's voice swells to a roar on this new record, the undeniable power grabs you by the collar and forces you to pay attention - and that's the difference between simply being heard and truly being understood.
Tour dates:
Apr 16 - Minneapolis, MN @ The Garage
Apr 19 - Toronto, ON @ Velvet Underground
Apr 21 - Montreal, QC @ Cabaret Foufounes Electrique
Apr 22 - Boston, MA @ ONCE Ballroom
Apr 24 - Philadelphia, PA @ Kung-Fu Necktie
Apr 25 - Brooklyn, NY @ Knitting Factory
Apr 26 - Washington, D.C. @ Pie Shop
Apr 30 - Pittsburgh, PA @ The Funhouse
May 01 - Columbus, OH @ Big Room Bar
May 05 - Austin, TX @ Big Room Bar
May 12 - Seattle, WA @ The Funhouse
May 13 - Portland, OR @ Twilight
