Disturbed Guitarist Dan Donegan on Inflation and Touring: “The Nature of the Environment Right Now Is Just a Little Challenging”
You’ve probably noticed that a number of tours over the last couple of months have been canceled due to unexpected or higher-than-average costs, even from road warriors like Anthrax, who have been been touring longer than some of their fans have been alive. Of course, we now know that it goes back to inflation and the rapidly-rising costs of things like fuel, food and other tour necessities that is making it hard to tour and it reaches up to the highest levels of the industry.
In a new interview with Rock 100.5 (transcribed by Blabbermouth) Disturbed guitarist Dan Donegan discussed the issue:
“Hopefully we’ll be able to announce [some tour dates] soon. It’s definitely in the works. We headlined a bunch of festivals this summer and [we spent time] just setting up this release. But we do have stuff on paper that we looked at and we agreed to it. Now it’s in the hands of our management and our booking agent and the promoters to make it logistically make sense, of the routing. So hopefully we’ll have something we could announce soon.”
He went on:
We just finished a couple of weeks ago in Dallas, a big show we did out there, and, like I said, we were just doing these festivals mainly. And then [the album] coming late at the end of the year, I think we were just doing more press stuff and preparing for a more productive show. Plus we wanted, unfortunately, to let time pass a little bit now that things are kind of slowly returning to normal. But it’s been challenging for a lot of bands too, as you may have heard, just logistically ’cause of inflation. So a lot of artists I’ve seen, especially over in Europe… I know that Shinedown had to postpone their tour, Anthrax, I think a few others. ‘Cause a lot of that stuff has skyrocketed on prices on, obviously, fuel costs and production costs and trucking costs and travel. So it’s been a little challenging for a lot of these artists to go out and do all these tours. That’s why I said we’re just trying to make sure that with the promoter we can do a proper routing so we don’t run into that same problem of having to postpone any dates. It’s just unfortunate. The nature of the environment right now is just a little challenging.”
Disturbed will be touring on their latest album, Divisive, which came out on Friday.
