Tyler, the Creator says he doesn’t have the same energy for touring as he did 15 years ago.
The two-time Grammy winner sat down with Converse for a conversation in London, which was posted to YouTube on Wednesday (May 28). Naturally, since Tyler’s on the Chromakopia World Tour until September, he was asked around the 4:45-minute mark about how it feels to perform in London.
“Touring now at 34 is not as fun as it was at 20,” Tyler admitted. “I’m mentally drained.”
The artist added that while he’s “physically OK” with being onstage for 90-minute sets with “nonstop movement,” performing does take a “mental toll” on him.
“The unfamiliarity, a different bed every night, the food—I’m not from this side of the world, so as much time as I spend on thinking about where I’m going to eat, bro it’s draining,” he said.
He added that it’s “so much stuff outside the clothes that you bring and, hopefully, the people around you.”
“It’s just brand new every day, and after a while it gets a bit stressful,” he explained. “My temperament is Los Angeles, so wide streets, low buildings, you see the sky all the time. A lot of places out here in Europe … it feels claustrophobic. It’s people on the street all the time, it’s a lot. And it feels heavy; I can’t go anywhere without a bunch of security.”
Tyler went on to say that “stress” weighs on his body because he cannot get “solitude.”
“What makes up for it is that these shows are incredible, and the people are excited,” he explained.
But Tyler does get a chance to recharge when he visits random spots while on tour, he said, like a library in London that he described as having “brutalist architecture.”
One stressful part of touring is when fans demand that he perform older songs, like in March when he shut down requests to perform Cherry Bomb tracks.
