Packin’ Light Tour

The Packin' Light Tour is a celebration of community music, creative repurposing, and slow travel, aiming to create and spread joy through spontaneous musical happenings and planned performances.

What is the Packin’ Light Tour?!

“The Packin’ Light Tour, and it’s initial incarnation, “The Very Official and Highly Professional Apples of ‘94 Tour, 2017” were rough sketches of ideas that we put into action. At the most basic level they involved me cycling long distances, carrying around a bunch of musical instruments, engaging with people, and camping out in the landscape at night.

It was an attempt to play with some ideas around sustainability, energy, art, and interaction, but at the time I didn’t think about it too much. I just kind of did it, learned some stuff, then did it again. In 2021 I used a masters program to look back at those tours and try to discover what they were, and what happened, and maybe even what they meant, examining them through the lens of community music, place making, and environmentalism.

I ran the first two tours under my old stage name Chad McCoy, as I was approaching the tours from more of a “music-industry” angle. I’ve since laid that stage name to rest, and going forward will be running these tours under my own name, coming at it from more of a community music angle. Which means looking at more ways that music and adventure can bring joy, focusing on under-serviced areas and planning more shows in places like group homes, nursing homes, family resource centres, etc.

I will write more about this soon, but for now you can watch the mini-doc that we put together from footage from the first tour, as well as my spot on Global News from the 2nd tour.”