Mickey Kenney and the five other members of Wasteland Hop are plenty familiar with the cold. Kenney, the emcee of the genre-bending hip-hop/folk/rock outfit, grew up in Anchorage, and for the past four years the band has called snowy Colorado home. Now there are big changes in store, and Alaska is part of a 5 ½-month journey that will ultimately lead the band to a much warmer clime.
The tour has been dubbed "The Greater Glacier and Equator Saga" by members Kenney, Steph Jay, Liz Gaylor, Adam Fallik, Brian Weikel and Nick Scheidies.
"We had this long, two-month dialogue where we would have these group conversations," says Kenney. "Where is everyone at? What are we willing to sacrifice? What is everyone's gauge on the (band's) trajectory?"
A chance email changed everything, steering the band away from their home base in Fort Collins and toward Ecuador.
"At the same time as I was looking for lodging for us, my friend who has lived in Ecuador the past five years emailed me out of the blue and asked if he could book Wasteland Hop on a tour there," Kenney says.
Once in Ecuador, the band will live together in a house and record a new album. The rest of the journey south will be spent touring through Alaska, Colorado and California. Videographer Samantha Hanus will travel with the group, documenting the entire adventure.
Considering Wasteland Hop's love of the wilderness, people and arts scene of Alaska, it's no surprise that the band chose to kick off the tour by booking shows around the state for the entire month of September, playing gigs in towns including Girdwood, Fairbanks and rustic McCarthy. Part of the stay has also been spent outside of the venues and on actual glaciers.
"We had one day off in McCarthy and got to go on the glacier, which was not only a good experience for us, but also for this saga," says Kenney. "It served as a pretty good symbolic launching point for us to begin this five-month adventure for each other and being with each other."
The band is now setting its sights on the Kenai Peninsula for the Seward Music and Arts Festival, which is known for being an inclusive, community-based event. "They flew us up last year, and it's definitely a blast," Kenney says. "There's so much character at that festival."
Festival attendees can expect to hear new material from Wasteland Hop's latest EP, "Symbiotic Clock," released in January. The tracks on "Symbiotic Clock" are rife with the band's usual energetic mix of spoken word, hip-hop and Jay's melodic vocals layered over the band's pop and rock landscapes.
"A lot of that material (on the album) we were composing the past couple of times we came back up to Alaska," says Kenney. The album's title was also inspired, in part, by the recession of the Arctic's glaciers.
"It's rather crazy, with Alaska and Colorado, it's become a landscape that our music is imbibed with," says Kenney. "The cold, glacial (feeling), we're very comfortable with it."
Always up for new and unique experiences, the band's last show in Alaska will be an interactive puppet murder mystery at Tap Root Public House (yes, you read that correctly).
"We wanted to leave Alaska with a pretty special event, or something that's different enough that we could carry it with us down on the road," says Kenney. "We're excited to extend the experience with something very different."
Wasteland Hop
When: 11:45 p.m. Friday, Sept. 25 (festival runs Friday-Sunday, Sept. 25-27), Seward Music and Arts Festival
Where: Alaska Railroad Cruise Ship Terminal Dock Building
Tickets: $6 per day or $15 for a festival pass
When: Doors open at 8:30 p.m., show starts at 10 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 26
Where: Tap Root Public House, 3300 Spenard Road
Tickets: $6 advance, $8 door, taprootalaska.com (21 and over)