This story is part of the Fall Travel issue, which is on sale here.
After a 10-year hiatus, Travis Morrison is leaving his tech gig in Durham, N.C., behind and going back on the road with his bandmates in The Dismemberment Plan — at least for a couple of weekends this fall. The beloved, Washington, D.C.-reared quartet reigned supreme over their corner of indie-minded, irreverent post-hardcore from 1993 until splitting up in 2003, but returned in 2013 with a new album and shows in front of adoring fans too young to have seen them in basements and other semi-legal venues the first time around. Then, they disappeared again.
Cut to 2024, and The Plan are near the top of the bill for the inaugural Best Friends Forever festival Oct. 11-13 in Las Vegas, alongside esteemed scene peers like Sunny Day Real Estate, Bright Eyes, Cap’n Jazz, Jawbox and Built to Spill. Beforehand, the group has four club shows lined up, in D.C., Richmond, Va., and Durham, N.C., the latter just around the corner from Morrison’s current home in Durham.
Fifty Grande cornered the singer/guitarist about leaving D.C. in the late 2000s, adjusting to his life in the Triangle and looking ahead to Best Friends Forever, just as he was preparing to spend three days cramming The Plan’s back catalog.
Are there any places you like to go to in America in the fall, or have found yourself while on tour and thought what a nice place it is to be during that time of the year?
Honestly, I think one of the better places on the planet to be in the fall is the southern mid-Atlantic of the United States. We have this really long tail of lightly warm weather into autumn. In North Carolina, it goes well into November, but the leaves are changing and we have the Appalachians, which is the carpet of colors. Autumn is Virginia and North Carolina’s time to shine.
You haven’t lived in Washington, D.C., in 15 years, but have your thoughts evolved on it as a place to live and/or a destination to visit?
It’s a different city than the one I knew and grew up in. One vibe of Washington is of a relatively modest, majority-Black Southern city. At the same time, it’s the capital of the western world with free museums downtown. The first time I went to a museum that cost money, I was enraged; like, this is not American! It still has that international, slightly nerdy aspect. I’d be 25 and go to a Smithsonian lecture for a date, you know? It’s not like [the debaucherous chronicle of the 2000s New York indie rock scene] “Meet Me in the Bathroom” (laughs). I would still love to live there. It is certainly way more expensive than it used to be. There’s more modern, Brooklyn-ish retail. Back then, it could be touch and go if there even was a grocery store open in your neighborhood.
The 9:30 Club is still the 9:30 Club. Some neighborhoods have changed more than others. Dupont Circle seems the same. Shaw has changed wildly, but you can still get great Ethiopian food. I went and was a little nervous; like, you didn’t change that, did you? Rest assured, Duke’s and all these Ethiopian restaurants are still in the U Street corridor. When you fly into National Airport, if you come from the Northwest, you’re gonna go along the Potomac and basically fly between Rosslyn and the Washington Monument. Being a local moving through the monuments, there’s kind of a liminal magic to it. It makes me want to go down for a jog when no one’s around. I really cherish it.
Let’s talk about Raleigh and the Triangle as a whole. What do you recommend?
Remember, I moved here with one child and immediately had two more. So, only now am I peering out of my house like, “What are you guys doing out here (laughs)?” Just getting an Airbnb for a day or two in Raleigh is quite worth it. We have this weird Neapolitan thing where it’s mountains, plains and the coast. It’s not quite as quick as northern Virginia, where mountains are 40 miles away and the bay is 40 miles away, but you can go out to Boone (N.C.) or Asheville in the summer, and that’s three hours away. It’s 15 degrees cooler because it’s up in the air. Or you can go to Wrightsville Beach or Wilmington (Del.), which is like an hour and a half away. A secret thing is that we are also less than two hours from Richmond. If you’re a traveler, the best way to use the Triangle is to fly in and get a rental car.
In the fall, the forest and the natural beauty is really incredible here. The arboretums are amazing. There are these vast forests with amazing paths and small rivers that run through them. Still, I think the best thing is that in all four directions, it’s centrally located between a bunch of different experiences. You can easily jump in a car and have one experience for 48 hours and come back and have another one.
What other regional oddities have you come to discover?
There’s a great organization called Taste Carolina that does food tours. This area is a little bonkers about its food, and that’s really rewarding. The barbecue obviously is an obsession here, and even within the state, there are feral arguments about who has the best. The barbecue here is good, but it’s kind of where the urban center is, so people come and make barbecue and ultra-sugared iced tea for the bougies. There’s also Cheerwine, which is a kind of fruity soda. There’s pimento cheese, which is peculiar and gets put on a lot of things. We are below the “biscuit line,” so there’s only one type of bread, and it’s biscuits (laughs hard). I have to confess that there was a certain point where I was like, “I think I might’ve had enough biscuits.” They’re all so great, but they’re everywhere. There’s a lot of chicken. If you’re in Durham, go to BB’s Crispy Chicken, which is run by Ashley Christensen. It’s fast food, but it’s not a chain.
In terms of Las Vegas, has The Plan really only played there once before in all their years of touring?
We played at a coffeehouse called Cafe Espresso in 2000. I felt like I was in Pensacola; like, we’re playing at the Java Bean Cafe with Alkaline Trio (laughs). It was not quite a venue, but it was also not a punk space. I later played a solo show that was actually at a venue on the Strip in a hotel. That was pretty weird. The people who would come in and out were not looking for what I was doing and I didn’t want to sing to them. After Cafe Espresso, we stayed with a kid whose dad was a blackjack dealer.
It feels like there’s something kind of poetic about this festival of reunited and classic emo and hardcore bands being held in a parking lot in Las Vegas in 2024.
I have a growing conviction that people don’t recognize how much late Millennials through Gen Xers are doing destination rock ’n’ roll travel to fairly routine shows. They’ll do 72 hours in Chicago, go see The Strokes and go out for sushi. I think that’s a big reason why the tickets for our shows in these regional markets sold out so fast. People just buy the tickets and they’re like, “Let’s do a trip!”
Everyone that’s going out to the Vegas show is sending me pictures of the pool with the cabana at their hotel. I think there’s gonna be a little bit of a grown and sexy indie rock [vibe] hanging out by the pool during the day, and then they can go mope the fuck out to American Football in a parking lot (laughs hysterically).
In terms of people I’m excited to see, it’s always, always The Jesus Lizard. It’s like men amongst boys. It’s a little embarrassing, almost. I deeply value Jawbox. Braid. I love Karate. Rainer Maria were our buddies from back in the day, and it’s going to be awesome to see them again. When you’re touring so much, you kind of only see the bands you’re playing with. So, I haven’t seen Bright Eyes since the one time he opened up for us in Columbia, S.C., when he was like 9 (laughs). It was shocking. It was like watching a child dunk a basketball. It was freakish. I’m excited to see Pinback. [Pinback member] Rob Crow’s first band, Heavy Vegetable, stayed with me in D.C. many, many years ago. There will probably be a little bit of meeting people for the first time and acting like we’ve all known each other for 20 years — like, deep, emotional hugs with the members of Hot Rod Circuit (laughs).
I had actually suggested that we do something really radical and build Plan Fest — like a little curated festival in Virginia. I thought, you know, if people are gonna travel for shows so readily? It does make me a little sad, because there’s a part of me that really wants to take the rock to Indianapolis, but if Indianapolis would rather leave Indianapolis and see shows somewhere else, who am I to argue?
