Los Angeles is, at best, a transient city filled with transitory dreamers. They come in all varieties these days: actors from
Sioux Falls, rockers from Detroit, photographers from
Reno, and immigrants from places most of us will never bother to find on a map.
Consequently, the people in the City of Angels are so disparate, so randomly tossed into the unnatural microcosm that is LaLa Land, that something like community becomes a word so foreign that no language can find it comforting. The Hotel Café, a former Hollywood coffee shop, evolved out of this into what many feel is the best singer-songwriter haunt on the West Coast, a home away from home where someone like Cary Brothers — who achieved indie infamy when his song "Blue Eyes" became a hit off the Garden State soundtrack — can always come back to for camaraderie and artistic support. Brothers' best friend and fellow Hotel Café regular Joshua Radin calls it, "our Cheers, but with guitars," and, while that might sound like a simplistic and personal sentiment, it's probably the best summary of how the Hotel Café Tour, spawned by the venue and currently in its third incarnation, was imagined into this world.
Cary Brothers (left) and Ingrid Michaelson ride into town on the Hotel Café Tour.
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The Hotel Café Tour, featuring Cary Brothers, Ingrid Michaelson, Greg Laswell, Kate Havnevik, Jessie Baylon, and Jim Bianco, is scheduled to take place on Tuesday, March 11.
The Clubhouse Music Venue in Tempe
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Brothers, who recently took time to chat over the phone from his front porch on a meteorologically temperamental L.A. afternoon, recalls how the idea struck him. "After a while, I realized there was so much great talent in that room on a Saturday night," he says. "What if we took a typical Saturday night at the Hotel Café, put it on a tour bus, and drove around the country? It was really just as simple as that."
Four years later, Brothers' musical love baby has learned to do a hell of a lot more than walk; he will now lead his rotating cavalcade of artists — including Radin, Ingrid Michaelson, Greg Laswell, and Jim Bianco — across the U.S., then over to the U.K., Europe, and, finally, Japan. The Hotel Café Tour, which began as an artistic movement to garner strength from numbers, has gone global.
"It's almost like a support system," says Laswell, who took a break from working on his latest album in San Diego to talk about Hotel Café itself and, by extension, the tour that is built upon its communal principles of encouragement, cooperation, and collaboration.
For example, the pressure to pack a room no longer rests squarely on what are often a relatively unproven artist's shoulders. "You share it with all your friends," Brothers says. "Most nights end up selling out, so it becomes more about what's happening onstage rather than whatever they can [do] to bring in an audience."
The Hotel Café's network of musical allies has exponentially grown over the past couple of years, though, much of this due to an influx of serious talent from around the country, looking to catch the ear of movie and television music supervisors who stalk the venue for new voices — which means it's becoming increasingly difficult to choose who gets to come along or drop in for short stints on each tour. Brothers, who is one of five co-owners of the tour, says, "Being the producer is the easy part, but being a friend of artists who can't play is tough." Those who make the cut do have one thing in common, besides being songwriters. "There's a shared knowledge of what it's like to" — Brothers pauses, searching for the right words — "not be successful." He laughs. "There's definitely shared knowledge of the hard work that went into getting here."
While there are many clamoring to get an invite from Brothers and the other co-owners, some, like Michaelson — who found success when some of her songs wound up on Grey's Anatomy — turn to the tour for a different kind of support than what is generally considered most valuable to artists. "Tour bus?" she says. "Yep, sign me up. I'm looking forward to the community and sleep, and a tour bus translates to a lot of sleep in my mind. I hope. I can't stress the no-driving thing enough."
Michaelson, who is the only other artist besides Brothers to make every U.S. stop on the tour this year, is also looking forward to the absence of the "cattiness" she usually finds on tours. "With so many musicians doing their own thing, there's no opportunity for competitiveness. That's very alluring to me."
"There are no egos," says Radin, who's only doing 21/2 weeks of dates (not including this week's Tempe gig) because, like Laswell, he has to finish his next album. "It's never about who gets more time onstage, who plays first, who plays last, who's the headliner. There's none of that." Artists play in short rotations, starting over halfway through, so even the opener gets to play in the middle of the night to a great crowd.
Then it's back to the tour bus, which everybody on the Hotel Café Tour shares (along with a house band). What happens onstage is for the audience, but it's the tour bus that makes this, as Brothers calls it, a "summer camp for musicians." It's why, he says, everybody wants to do the tour; it's a "release," a vacation from even your own tours.
