Sam Pomanti

Today I returned to Tokyo after playing the last show of the NARITA THOMAS SIMPSON tour in Sapporo last night. It was a fun and busy month of stretching out to various corners of Japan and snapping back to Tokyo in some sort of rubber-band ritual. This style of touring is quite different from what I’m used to in such large continental countries as Canada and the USA, where it is more common to go out on more extended runs which last weeks or even months, and the ground constantly moves underneath you until it’s time to go home. The NTS tour had us going on bullet trips to the destination cities, mostly on the appropriately-named bullet train, and it certainly requires a different sort of energy preservation and allocation when a cross-country tour can be fit into a regular working schedule in your home city. I learned this while having a great time with the artist, band and crew over the last month, and I’m happy to say we completed the tour safely and to great success with the warm audiences all around Japan. It was lovely checking in to all these cities I hadn’t visited in some time (Ōsaka, Fukuoka, Nagoya, Sendai and Sapporo), enjoying with silent amazement the variety in culture, language and cuisine this country has in seemingly infinite store. I want to thank Aoyama Hideki for asking me to be a part of this group’s nascent era starting back in November 2023 for their debut show at LINE Cube Shibuya, and to Narita Shouji and Teraoka Yohito for their wonderful songwriting and leadership which offered me a great experience over the last month or so. Thanks also to the other support members, my good friend Oka Satoshi, who I was able to work with in a setting removed from our AKIMBO project, and Ryou-san for her quirky charm and multitalent. The crew was so professional while making their presence nearly invisible—yet if they truly weren’t there nothing would have gotten done, and it certainly wouldn’t have turned out to be as great a show as it was. A thanks also to those who came out to the performances—your energy became our energy to complete the cross-country tour!

NARITA THOMAS SIMPSON 2024 TOUR COMPLETE! ツアー終了！