GRUFF RHYS - Tour 2025

In the organizer's words:

In 2012, Gruff Rhys embarked on a solo concert tour through the heartland of America, following in the footsteps of his distant relative John Evans. Each night he performed songs, complemented by a PowerPoint presentation detailing the incredible story of his relative and including any new information that had come to his attention during the day. Finally, he searched for Evans' lost, anonymous grave.

In addition to many major cities, the tour also took him to perform on the Mandan and Omaha reservations, at a vineyard in Missouri, in villages at the bottom of the Mississippi that no longer exist and in a brothel in New Orleans. This investigative concert tour resulted in the 2014 album "American Interior", a book, a film and an extensive tour under the same name. Using the dusted-off PowerPoint presentation, Gruff Rhys revisits the 2025 project with a full band to perform the songs that made up both the album and the movie soundtrack.

Gruff says of the reissue:

"Playing "American Interior" again eleven years later feels very prescient. Following the unusual story of explorer John Evans (1770-1799), it becomes clear that made-up stories can have profound and unpredictable consequences in real life.

His scarcely believable journey of verification through the continental wilderness in search of a [fictional] Welsh-speaking tribe believed to live on the Great Plains of North America (an old folk tale propagated by the Elizabethan court after the subjugation of Wales to make colonial claims to America on behalf of the British) had dramatic political repercussions and devastating consequences for himself and some of his supporters.

I wrote an album of songs inspired by his life, "American Interior", which also served as the soundtrack to a documentary film based on a book describing his journey. This was intertwined with my own investigative concert tour; I worked on all three projects simultaneously during a two-year fever from 2012 to 2014.

By far the most ambitious undertaking I have ever dared to undertake.

Living with one foot in the 18th century and wearing the same clothes the whole time (for cinematic reasons) left me pretty exhausted. (Imagine a cold extra from the movie "The Revenant.") It took me a while to process the whole experience and the lessons learned. I feel like I owe it to my former self to take these songs back on tour for a few months and retell the story for a new decade."

- Gruff Rhys