Taking Off With Farewell Flight

When I first heard Farewell Flight’s music, I knew I would have to talk with them before they made their stop in Hamden on April 26. The band’s drummer, Marc Prokopchak, was nice enough to sit down and let me know about the inner workings of how Farewell Flight manages to make and release music despite their lack of a record label, as well as how they manage to tour as often as possible.

Edward Gaug: Next week you’ll be starting nearly two months of touring, starting off in your home state of Pennsylvania, then trav- eling north through Connecticut, then hitting the Midwest down to Oklahoma and traveling back up to Pennsylvania to end it. How do you personally get ready to spend all this time traveling and living in a van with three other people?

Marc Prokopchak: Well, the first part is actually booking the tour. That’s my biggest worry; everything else comes second after that. Booking those dates and getting everything set management-wise as far as the shows and getting all the details, like load-in time and when doors are. Getting that all together is the first step—after that, we all kind of live meagerly because we don’t make much money and any money we do make goes right back into the band. We all pack a duff le bag and we get some groceries, usually stuff that won’t go bad if we keep it in the van, and we go on from there.

EG: With booking a tour, you try to have all your dates planned out; but have you ever come across problems and had to jump on a show or play a house show? Because I seem to hear about that happening more frequently.

MP: We have played all types of shows—we’ve had really good shows and really bad shows. If we get a cancellation and we can fill that date, within a week or two with something like a house show or jump on a show, that’s golden. We’ve done that a few times. We’ve also had a few things go wrong with cancellations due to younger kids running [shows] and not knowing what they’re really doing. When we go on tour, I’ll send them a follow-up message making sure everything is cool with the show, making sure it hasn’t been cancelled because the venue got shut down by the police or something. We’ve definitely run into that; but if that’s the case and we can’t get on something somewhere else, we’ll end up taking the night off and try to make the best of it, hanging out or sleeping in the van.

EG: Farewell Flight has this particular tour going through the month of May; do you guys have any plans from summer, whether it is playing festivals or another tour?

MP: We pretty much have the whole summer mapped out; as festivals, not so much this year. We played a bunch last year, but that’s because we had some label affiliation and they kind of pulled the strings on all that type of stuff. This summer we are completely independent again, so even the festivals we played last year, it was nearly impossible to get back into unless you have a label backing you or someone else going to bat for you. Basically, we’re just going to tour on our own this summer. After the April-May run is over, we’ll be home for like three weeks and then we’ll head out for about three weeks in June, and that stint’s about three-quarters of the way booked. They haven’t been posted yet, but they are in the confirmation stages. Then we’ll be home for another week or two and then back out on the road from mid-July to early August, for what hopefully will be a CD release run. We’re trying to hit up venues that we have played a lot in the recent years and that we can have our album ready. It’s been recorded since last year and people have been wanting it, and we’re finally getting it released by doing it ourselves this summer. Those are the summer plans, but from there on out it will be what we do always: be on the road as much as possible and come home and work a little bit and then head out again.

This is the short version of the interview, for the whole thing you can check here.