MANSFIELD — Perhaps playing a home show is the best way for a band to remember its roots.
Narrow/Arrow headlined a show at Relax, It’s Just Coffee Thursday night before beginning a 10-day tour of the southeastern United States.
“We’re doing the run with the band, Cave Paint from Lancaster, Pennsylvania,” Narrow/Arrow’s lead singer and guitarist Cody Nicholas said. “It’s part of just getting yourself out there.
“At this level that’s really what you have to do — just get your self out there.”
Narrow/Arrow signed with Other People Records, a Los Angeles record label in 2015, but Nicholas knows having fun on the road means more than making a profit.
“We also just like to travel. That’s a big part of getting to be in a band — getting to see a different city every night. It’s not always about how a gig goes if the city is cool.”
Nicholas describes the 10-day musical odyssey as a standard tour, but hopes it can continue to remind the band why it plays.
“We’ve got a mixture of house shows and cool venues. We have a lot of cool venues when we go down south, which I’m excited about,” he said. “We are doing a similar loop to what we did in February, and it’s always interesting to see if more people come out than did last time and if you made a good impression.
“That’s the whole concept, building a following.”
Nicholas said having fun needs to be at the center of every musician’s focus, not making or relying on money or notoriety.
“A lot of bands think about how well a show goes based off of how much merchandise they sell or how they were received, but I’ve always thought, ‘Was it a good time?’ he said.
This tour is the first time the band will have a goal for money made, he said. But keeping in tune with the fun over profit ideal, he said there is a lot of wiggle room.
“I’m not going to be like, ‘Dude I need $100 or we’re not playing,’ ” he said. “But the actual venues, we’ve talked about splits.”
Even with promised money for gigs, Nicolas said making money a priority for a still “trying to make it” is not the best way to spend energy.
“It’s pretty bold to not go broke in your first year,” he said. “A lot of people want to treat it as a business. But if you are treating it as a business, your clientele are fickle.
“You’re in music that’s even more tricky than opening up a restaurant or more easy to fail. At this level, (making money as a priority) is not something you should do.”
So Narrow/Arrow kicked off their tour with home field advantage — it’s where two of the band members (Nicolas and bassist Mark Canole) work as baristas — in a place where they can have fun, enjoy the crowd and make music together.
