Singer/songwriter Alice Tong is embarking on a one week West Coast tour with her band and needs your help. The tour will be for her new album “Please Be Brave Before the Lions They Come,” which drops May 29, 2010. So how much does going on tour with a band for 1 week really cost? Here’s how Alice breaks down the cost:

There are 7 band members including me:
Alice Tong- vocals, keyboard, guitar, harmonica, ukelele
Miles Senzaki- drums and percussion
Patrick Taylor- acoustic and electric bass
Nate LaPointe- electric and acoustic guitars, mandolin, pedal steel (what a deal!)
Claire Courchene- cello and trombone
Albert Chiang- vocals and acoustic guitar
Mei-Ling Murray- backup vocals and tour manager

Basics: As human beings, we need food and shelter for a week to survive 😉 which ends up being around $3,270.00.

Travel: As traveling musicians for a 1 week tour, we need gas and a large vehicle to get us to venues, which equals $1,317.49.

Musician Salaries: My bandmates deserve to be compensated for their time and the days that they will need to take off of work in their hometowns. If you read any of their bios online, you will see that they are extremely talented and hard-working folks who have spent their lives studying and playing music so that they could be professionals in this industry. I already feel bad about not having enough to pay them what I really think they deserve, but hope to one day be able to. For now, I hope to make some money to pay them from our shows, be able to cover their food and shelter costs, and pay them at least $175 each for that week. For all 6 of them, that would be $1050.

That puts us at $5,637.49 TOTAL.
Taking into account possible rate changes (hotel rates for different cities, gas rates changing) and disasters (van breaks down! we get lost driving! someone needs medical treatment(?)! our musical equipment breaks down! etc…unfortunately the list could go on), we can round our total to:
= $6,000 GRAND TOTAL!

Phew… Touring isn’t as easy as it sounds. To help Alice Tong on her tour, you can kick in some bucks here. (that page also has an even more detailed cost analysis of the tour.) She’ll also throw in some gifts for your support based on the amount you contribute.

Help fund the Alice Tong West Coast Tour