In 2009 I got in the van with the Toronto hardcore band Creeper. I was fresh out of PhotoJ school and after going home and working at a farm all summer, I was invited to go on a tour across Canada. I had always wanted to go on a big tour and badly wanted to experience and document the lifestyle of musicians – especially DIY bands that were more likely to play a basement than a bar.

I had met the guys in Creeper while growing up going to shows in Toronto. We connected quickly and I spent much of college documenting their house – the Brohaus – in Toronto where they would often throw shows in the kitchen and basement.

The tour went from Toronto to Victoria and basically everywhere in between. The van we travelled in – which had no windows beyond the front passenger seat – began to give us trouble on day two as we pulled into Marathon Ontario. The news was not good but amazingly the band decided to continue on, crawling under the van to shift the transmission from drive to park to reverse by hand every time we had to park until we reached a city that had the part we needed – without missing a show.

This tour was my first glimpse into the reality of life on the road. The fun, the boredom and the work. The feeling of pure freedom as well as the isolation of always moving. I did my best to shoot real moments of life as well as taking some great shots of the shows.