Rock Showcase Preview: Pineapple Tours

This year, the Curb College of Entertainment and Music Business Rock Showcase will feature, among a few other bands, Pineapple Tours.

Pineapple Tours, or patours as they call themselves, is made up of Lake Markham, Erik Maynard, JP Hechter, Jacob Kissamis and Brock Burger.

The band brings classic folk and indie songwriting techniques to the table while incorporating thought-provoking lyrical and musical motifs based off of social theory and various art forms.

“I started patours as an Internet art project in the summer of 2014,” says Markham. “I had gotten tired of the superficial music scene around Belmont, plus I was reading a lot of social theory and listening to music like vaporwave, which is a critique of consumerist society.”

Pineapple Tours is bound to bring a fresh live performance to the showcase Saturday, hopefully incorporating some of those themes into their live show.

The band has an EP up for free on Bandcamp, and they plan to release more music in the coming future, although the plans to move forward after that are limited to utilizing the Internet.

“It has gotten more attention than we expected, probably because it went from being nothing to being in showcase pretty much overnight,” says Markham. “It’s been more than we could have asked for, but it’s been stressful. We will probably take a break after a few shows and go back to producing content on the Internet. School is most important to us.”

At a school riddled with indie-folk music about hometowns, train tracks and best friends, Pineapple Tours is a breath of fresh air of interesting of lyrical and thematic messages with influences from some exciting sources of thought.

“The showcase will be fun,” Markham said, “But it has been a lot of work.”

This article was written by Erik Gleim. Photo by Sam Frawley.