Image Courtesy of PhotoFinish/Republic RecordsMisterWives are in the midst of their fall headlining tour, which they've dubbed the Scrapbook tour. While many tour names are nothing more than a name, MisterWives plan to create an actual scrapbook on the tour.
"Before Instagram and Facebook and Twitter all took over the world, I remember making scrapbooks when things were really special in my life," frontwoman Mandy Lee tells ABC Radio. "I always thought it was a really fun way to look back and be like, 'Wow, this was such a monumental part of my growing up.'"
"We though it'd be fun -- you take a lot of photos on the road -- if we made an actual physical scrapbook of that," she continues. "We're gonna raffle it off and give all the proceeds to Food Not Bombs, which feeds homeless people healthy meals, and so we just thought it was a cool...that some fan's gonna get to win this thing and be like, 'Look what I was a part of!'"
A scrapbook isn't the only thing MisterWives are making for the Scrapbook tour -- during the show, the band will be playing inside a house on stage that they themselves built. That idea was inspired by the title track from their debut album, Our Own House, which contains the lyric "We built our own house with our hands over hearts."
"Our tour manager was like, 'So yeah, we need to send it out to a stage company to build the house,'" drummer Etienne Bowler tells ABC Radio. "And I was like, 'Nah, the song isn't called 'We hired stage hand to build our own house,' it's called 'we built it ourselves.' So we're gonna do that ourselves."
Before she wrote "Our Own House," Lee was struggling with a nasty case of writer's block. She decided to combat that by staying in a tree house that Bowler, whom she is dating, built across the street from his parent's house. The result has become a mission statement of sorts for not just Lee and Bowler, but for MisterWives as whole.
"It inspired me because it is, yes, a literal house, but it was a figurative thing of us kinda just building our own world and sticking to our guns," Lee says. "It was based off our relationship, but it also speaks for the band, I think."
The Scrapbook tour continues September 29 in Norfolk, Virginia. The trek concludes November 8 in Washington, D.C.
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