Been very pleased to see the positive reaction to the announcement of the US and Canada tour dates last week. To those people who asked why I wasn’t coming further west this time, as well as those Canadians who rightly pointed out that Canada is more than just Toronto, I feel I should give you some explanation about how the routing for the tour was reached. Over the past few years, I’ve been trying to reduce the carbon footprint of my tours. The simplest way to achieve this was to reduce the size of my touring party. The last few times I’ve crossed the Atlantic, I’ve been flying on my own, using domestic crew, specifically a tour manager who also doubles up as a sound engineer. And while it’s not possible to get to North America without flying, I can construct my tour routing in such a way that enables me to drive between shows once I’m there, rather than flying every day between cities. This of course has an effect on the distances I can cover in one trip. Past tours that involved flying and playing the same day allowed me to cover both coasts and places in between, but the carbon cost was very high. I can cut that down by driving, but it does mean that I can’t reach everyone every time. The orginal idea of the coming tour was that I should pick up a few places that I haven’t been to for a few decades – Atlanta, Durham – then run up the east coast, turning inland after Boston to head up to Burlington VT, then on into Canada for dates in Montreal, Ottawa and Toronto. The tour would end there, as three weeks is about my limit these days. However, the Montreal date didn’t come together, for reasons beyond my control, which meant a reroute west to Northampton and Troy was in order to get to Toronto. Losing Montreal and Ottawa gave me an extra two dates to play with, so we’re going to end the tour with dates in Detroit and Chicago. My apologies to fans living north of the 49th parallel. I hope to be back next year with a string dates that does amount to a Canadian tour, as well as some shows on the west coast of the US Tickets available here: www.billybragg.co.uk/giglistings