The Blue Stones - BUS INVADERS Ep. 2136

You know, you always feel like, oh, I'm going to read a book this tour. It never happens. It never happens. Only pee-pees, no poo-poos, okay? This is like the best readily available bourbon that isn't $200. Hey, hey, welcome in! What's going on? Come on! Please, enter. The Bluestones bus. So we are on our Metro North American tour that is in promotion of our new album, Metro, which we're very proud to have released. And we're here at the Vic Theatre in Chicago. And a little bit more of a different setup. Last time we were on a bandwagon, and now we got a real bus. We're on a bus suspension. Legit. So let's take a tour. Dance party? Yeah, we typically like to host dance parties on nights that we don't particularly go out to bars. We just kind of get the crew and us in here. Be running DJ through Bluetooth on here. Got a couple of music videos playing on the TV. All the drinks are here. Yep, and we just kind of go wild in here, you know? It's kind of fun, like, as the bus is shaking. We've gone up on couches. You know, a lot of crazy stuff happens, right? So bus parties are definitely number one in this front row. Yeah, this is the bus party zone. Lately, it's been a lot of Charlie XCX, a lot of John Summit, Malala. Yeah, yeah. Some Justice kind of sprinkled in there if we're feeling a little bit more edgy EDM. It's a lot of electronic dance music. A lot. That's just what we end up bopping to. Got to do it. Yeah, got to do it. Yeah. This one's very clearly mine. Peanut butter. I like all natural, creamy. Tarix, you eat a gill. Very simple. Very simple rule to follow, to be honest. And then in case I am feeling a little bit crunchy, I do have a crunchy. And again, you know, I just make sure that everybody knows. It's a little crunchy. A little crunchy, as is the disclaimer. We basically have a fully working bakery here. All different types of bread. Way too much bread here. I think it's because everybody has different preferences. Yeah, I mean, I like the honey wheat because I have a little bit of a sweet tooth. I like the Killer Dave's Killer Bread. Yeah, that's good. Someone likes that. Every once in a while, I'll be a little nasty and I'll dip into the white bread, you know, the fluffy white bread. Quest Bar is a must-have every day. Every day. So much fiber, so much protein. Good stuff. Obviously, there's wine. There's booze just hidden everywhere. Oh, actually. This might have been a victim of the dance party at one point. Ryder is sandwich materials, usually. So, deli meats, turkey, ham, mortadella. Breads, obviously, every single night. We are a big sandwich crew. I'm going to pull something out. We can go into this drawer after, but there's a key. There's a key element as to why we're such a big sandwich crew. I think it is the soft drawer there, Tess. Well, there's a toaster. Well, there is a toaster as well. Right, so this is for the morning, you know, peanut butter jam toast. If you're ever feeling like you need a little practice. But this is really the key reason why we're such a sandwich crew. This is it. Panini press. How many buses, you know, with a fully operational panini press? Not many. Not many at all. Not many. That does really well during the dance parties, actually. Also dangerous. Yeah, yeah. Okay, so this is obviously the most important. The liquor drawer. A lot of bourbon. Specifically the bourbons. These are like our bourbons of choice. This mixture, small batch, is good. This is our rider bourbon. Woodford. Double oaked. So many times we don't get the double oaked, and I'm like, man, it's right beside the normal stuff. This is like the best readily available bourbon that isn't $200 by far. So we always go with that with the rider because it's consistent. We got some good stuff in here. Sometimes we like to switch it up. We'll do like on Saturdays or whatever, we'll do some mezcal or some tequila. A good buddy of ours who has a cool Instagram page got us this. We haven't even cracked it yet. But this is a very, very, very fine bourbon. We'll probably crack this at the end of the tour once we're capping everything off. So we always appreciate good bourbon, good rare stuff. This is kind of like the rest of our crew items here. So this big drawer here, you might want to come around. We have cutlery on top. We have spices and seasonings because our front of house, our sound guy, loves to cook on tour. He has a charcoal grill that he brings. He has a blackstone that he brings, which is basically like a big griddle. So we have a lot of materials. So he's able to make us amazing smash burgers and quesadillas and fajitas and just really whatever you can think of on the grill. Underneath that, more spices, more protein bars. We have so many protein bars. I know. I just realized. We have teas. Then we get into a bit more of the healthy stuff here. So we have our tea drawer, our hydration, our hydration multipliers, which I never really understood. Why is it a multiplier? I don't know. It doesn't really make sense. More bread here, amazingly. Then as we keep going, this is our kitchen items, but also doubles as our vitamin drawer, right? Magnesium, zinc, vitamin D, ashwagandha is in here. I mean, we really got everything. We got almost like a fully operational pharmacy in here. But you can't quote me on that because we'll get in a lot of trouble. And then finally, we have our dirty little snack drawer. So this is usually full of chips and actually specifically full of like jalapeno chips for some reason. But now we have just some tortilla chips. And then underneath it all, take a look at this. Look at all this hot sauce that we have. And like untouched as well. There's some that are, but sometimes if we have wings or like some kind of meat where we cook on tour, we just like to have the option. We're not going to use it, but we want the option. All right. So the game, the game on tour, if we're not doing like a DJ bus party, dance party, we're playing Yahtzee, okay? Tarek does a very special version called DJ Yahtzee. He has a playlist built out of songs that represent the person who's rolling the dice. And right the second that they touch the dice, your song comes on. Your next song comes on. So you're always looking forward to your next turn. So you never know what song you're going to get next. But Yahtzee is an absolutely underrated game. It's incredibly exciting. And we've had some of our best nights on the bus playing it. It's so simple. So simple. All you need is five dice. That's it. It's pretty great. It's the best. For the most part, they're just shoes. So I think this is, yeah, just a couple of shoes. I think it's the same thing here. Yeah. These are all just shoes. I put sandals here. This one has these weird like slats for like, the sandals don't really fit. I don't know what else these would be for, so I've been putting my sandals here. That's really all that is. Well, before you do that, I mean. Toilet. Okay. So as everybody who's been in a bus knows, only pee-pees know poo-poos. Okay. And that's because of the plumbing, but also the hole. But yeah, this is basically, you know, an operational bathroom. Right here is really interesting. Normally for a towel, but I find it's nice for support, you know, especially when the bus is moving. You know, you kind of just make sure that your aim is on. So that's the toilet. Fridge. So we have a bunch of condiments here, some homemade jam. I think that's actually from the Darcy's. Oh, wow. We have a lot of different things like salsa, hummus, diet Coke. It's kind of just like a mishmash of things, but there's the deli meats that we were talking about, cheeses, butter in case we're making toast, jalapeno in case we're feeling a little bit spicy, and coffee. Cold brew coffee every day. I don't even really go to coffee shops anymore. I just do the cold brew thing right when you wake up. And then our freezer. Some burgers, some wings. There's actually some salt and straw ice cream in there, which is not ours, but I'm going to take some. Air compressor doors. Great when they work. Awful when they don't. These ones work with the power of force. Isn't that incredible? Welcome to Bunk Alley. Bunk selection is very important. I actually had to switch bunks mid-tour because I wasn't sleeping so well. So I was in the middle. I ended up going on the bottom. I like, I'll just show you my bunk. I like the bottom because, so the bottom you usually get a little more bump, but not as much sway. As a side sleeper, when I was sleeping up top, any time that the driver turned, I would fall and wake up. And so I went for the bottom, and sleeps have been a lot better because of that. I put like a little mattress topper on my, it's like a foam mattress topper. It just makes it a little more comfortable. That's why it looks a little messy. I swear it's not. Got a little alcove thing here. Put your glasses in here. Got a book that I've read about two pages of. You know, you always feel like, oh, I'm going to read a book this tour. Never happens. Yeah, so that's my bunk. That's my bunk selection. This is, you know, we do have a total of four junk bunks, just because of our ratio of crew and bunks in this tour, which is really nice. It makes for a very spacious atmosphere. This is a very prototypical junk bunk, right? So this is specifically mine and Justin's junk bunk. So we'll have our personals on here, like personal carry-ons, which we use to go to and from the bus into venues. We have our backpacks, our toiletries, just kind of random things strewn about. But I also keep my acoustic guitar, which I use for VIP, in an actual bunk because I find that if you keep it in a trailer, it's going to get rattled around a lot. And if you keep it in a bay, it's going to get really, really hot, so the temperature will screw with your tuning. So it's really, really well placed here in the junk bunk. Really, the rule on the bus is you don't have any bags or anything on seating areas, like chairs or couches. You have so many junk bunks that there's no reason for you to put a bag on a couch. And if you do, you can absolutely call it out for it. Oh, yeah. Happens every day. So eight people on the bus, which means four junk bunks. It's nice because everybody gets half of a junk bunk to themselves, and there's a lot of tours where it's like ten people on the bus, which means ten people with bags and only two junk bunks, and that's a nightmare. So we have it nice and easy just being a two-person band. A nice touch that we've added here is actually identifiers for everybody in the bunk. So Jesse, you know, he's our hacker. We have Caroline, our tour manager, who's just like a rock and roll chick. Avi, who is just super into little cute things. Just little identifiers of who everybody is. And it just kind of helps to see where everybody is in case for whatever reason. But really the rule is when the curtain's closed, that's you behind the curtain. You don't open a curtain. That's insane. That's your time. So this is my bunk. I do choose the middle on the driver's side. I find that the driver is more attentive and is closer to their side, so they're less likely to go on a rumble strip. Also, the middle is just kind of a good ratio of sway to not a lot of rattle on the lower bunks. I haven't really experimented with... Actually, well, before I used to do a top bunk, and the reason why is because top bunks almost always, another junk bunk here, have a higher ceiling, right? So if you are a side sleeper or if you get a little bit claustrophobic and you don't mind the height, top bunk is probably your choice because you just have a lot more... Just a pain to get in and out of. That is true. That's another reason why I like the ground because you just slide right in, slide right out. Yeah. Top bunk, you got to climb. You got to put your foot on someone's... And that's one thing that sucks about the middle bunk is that in the middle of the night, you'll just have someone's foot ******* stepping up here to get into your... That's a pain in the ass. The amount of times I go to the washroom at night too, there's no way I could be on a top bunk. I just drink so much water that I'm up like three times a night. And here's the back lounge. This is it. So, another entertainment zone. Lately... It's an entertainment zone, it's a casino. It was a casino last night. The casino last night and... Yeah, I lost my shirt. Brought the PS5 on tour. It's great for just like decompressing at the end of the night, wind down with some video games. It's awesome. And it's good to put it back here because obviously people want to hang in the front lounge. You want some privacy and they want some privacy. So, I finished Kingdom Come Deliverance 2. It was really, really great. We both said that that was one of the games that brought me back to Skyrim level of like, wow, this is a really, really good game. So, that was really good. And I just finished that and we only have two days left so I'm not playing anything else. But last night, we were playing Pass the Pigs back here. Great game, underrated game. We were playing for money and we had some exciting games. Small bets but good bets. But exciting games. It gets really, really, really good. Exciting games. So, that was really good. Back here, the drawers are just, again, shoes. Can never have enough room for shoes. Same thing here. Bunch of shoes. Usually, we keep, you know, our show clothes will be in the back lounge. This is more of just like a hat and lanyard sort of covered but also we have this, the fabric spray. You know, just as we are letting things dry. It's nice to keep them smelling pretty good. But yeah, this is typically where we keep all of our show clothes. So, we open up these cupboards here. You know, we're jamming them all in here. But yeah, this is all of our show outfits, right? Jackets, shirts, but it's where we keep what we wear for shows because we can hang them up. If something gets particularly sweaty, we take it out of the cupboard and we let it hang just so it can get some air flow. This is basically just like another junk zone. Yeah, yeah. If we had more clothes, we'd probably put it in there. Yeah, yeah. Well, thanks for spending your time with us. You know, we do have a new record out. You can find us on our website. But more importantly, just look us up on Instagram and TikTok. We're just on there every single day. That's probably where we're going to get the most news. Yep. Make sure you spin the new record, Metro. Yeah. Okay, you got to get out of here because we got to get ready for your show. Okay. All right, see you. See you later.