Rigometric, a three-member music band that includes two Knox County natives, cruised their touring bus back into their home base of Portland, Monday, Feb. 13, for the rare luxury of crashing for a night or two in their own beds. Completing two more stops afterward, the band is now wrapping up their third tour since May of 2022 when they first hit the road. This latest tour jumped on stage January 18, 2023, for the first of 18 gigs (one got postponed), taking their original music through 10 states, going south to Virginia and North Carolina, and west to Kansas.
“There’s just something about it, to us, when you perform in front of a lot of people in a packed room,” said Owls Head native Keenan Hendricks. “It’s what it’s all about.”
In May, he and bandmates Derek Haney, of Portland, and Josef Berger, of Rockland, will head out again.
“For where we’re at, with the level of a band, it [this latest tour] definitely was pretty successful,” said Hendricks.
Rigometrics books their own gigs, aiming for venues with capacity limits within the 50-120 range so that an audience of 55 people in a 75-capacity venue will feel packed. The members are not having trouble finding those venues, with the added honor of selling out a 300-seat Portland venue. The last time they played the Midcoast, last Thanksgiving, they sold out at 230 people.
Hendricks said that this latest tour wasn’t a headline tour, “but we’ll get there,” he added. In a handful of out-of-state gigs, only Rigometrics played. For the most part, though, Hendricks needed to find one or two local bands, and then Rigometrics placed themselves in the middle of the lineup.
“It tended to work out really well that way,” he said.
In their two previous tours, Rigometrics traveled to North Carolina and back. This time, after North Carolina, they drove their bus west towards Kansas.
“We had no idea what to expect for the areas we’d never been,” said Hendricks. “For the most part, it went really well. A solid turn out. A good vibe. A really good response to our music.”
There were only two gigs that didn’t have a lot of people.
“But it happens,” he said. “That’s the glory of the road.”
Rigometrics is an original act. Ninety-five percent of the time, they play their original songs.
“It’s a really special moment when these people – some of them you know, some of them you don’t know – are feeling the vibe and are really resonating to your original content,” said Hendricks.
Now that most of their shows are ticketed, planning and booking has become a little more strategic. Hendricks doesn’t want to over saturate an area, especially being an original act.
“You don’t want to feel like your act is dull,” he said. “You want to try to make it seem like every time you come to an area it’s a special thing – which we feel it is.”
Touring in a new area, however, can allow multiple visits since they are not known in that area.
“There’s a decent chance that we might be on the road half of this year,” he said.
Rigometric’s first tour was in May 2022 for about four weeks. The second one was in September, which was pretty similar to this one – 18 shows in 30 days. In the last seven months, the band has been gone for three.
“It’s going well enough for us to justify doing it again,” he said.
Look for our Wave magazine article for an article about how Rigometrics got its start. The Wave will be distributed mid- to late May 2023.
Reach Sarah Thompson at news@penbaypilot.com
