July 07, 2010 by Scott Taylor

    Connect Statesboro's 2010 Battle of the Bands winner, Born-Forty, was touring the country on a 40-day national tour. Exclusively for Connect Statesboro, lead singer Scott Taylor sent us another diary of the trials and tribulations of being a touring group.
    
    If you sit down to eat a bowl of corn flakes sometime in the near future and taste of motor oil, I apologize.
     In what I can only describe as “BP in-miniature”, the van that once carried my band across the U.S. threw an engine rod, decorated a Nebraska cornfield with oil, and exploded on the side of the I-80, leaving me and my band, Born-Forty, stranded 100 miles from what mildly qualifies as “civilization.”
    For a touring band, a blown engine ranks fourth on an endless list fears, only being outranked by a devastating accident, having your equipment stolen, or being signed to a major label and being forced to collaborate with Justin Britney. Just kidding Justin; we love you.
    Despite my light-hearted approach, there’s no pretending that loosing our van on our first national tour doesn’t have serious consequences.
    It takes months of planning and work to coordinate the venues, booking agents, promoters, and media for a national tour, not to mention a budget for fuel, tolls, food, and sleeping accommodations.
    There's never a good time for a disaster to strike,  but losing our van couldn’t have come at a worse time. Replacing the van will be expensive, considering we just finished producing our second album, and are dealing with its production and manufacturing costs. We will also lose thousands of dollars in income from shows we can't play on the West Coast.
    I’ve been comforted by seeing the situation in its full context. We were able to get everyone and everything safe and secure, and then headed back to Statesboro to regroup.
    We’ve already made plans to get new transportation and reschedule our missed tour shows.
    In the meantime, we're planning a huge CD release party in Statesboro, and already have shows lined up for the rest of the summer and fall.
    We have a lot to be grateful for — the fact that we had a van to break down in, or that we even had a national tour to cut short is actually pretty cool.
    The stories and memories that we’ve shared are priceless, and this is only the start. Our band has been together for just over a year, and it's been a heck of a ride so far. There's no telling where the road will go.
    There are constantly new opportunities to perform our music and grow our fan base, but far more important than the business aspect of Born-Forty, is the fact that we get to do what we love.
    There 's something to be said for unabashedly pursuing ones dreams, no matter how fantastic, and that's what we do. After all the headache, heartache, stress, blood, sweat, and tears, there is nothing like stepping out on stage to kick off another unforgettable evening.
    It’s like the quote from the famous essayist, John Burroughs: “For anything worth having one must pay the price; and the price is always work, patience, love, self-sacrifice.” It’s a small price to pay if you ask me.

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