photo by Margarita Platis

Chadwick Stokes has never been satisfied to limit his impact on the world to just one endeavor. The Boston native is the frontman of two bands, Dispatch and State Radio, maintains a successful solo career and still finds time to spearhead various humanitarian efforts. But he doesn’t seem to mind the hard work. “It’s a bit of a juggling act, but it’s fun because each new thing is pretty refreshing,” Stokes says.

With his current solo tour, dubbed the Forced to Flee Tour, Stokes combines a bit of all three, performing songs from his recently released album The Horse Comanche while fronting a five-piece band and doing service projects in many of the cities along the way. He explains that the current incarnation of the band has been named Chadwick Stokes and the Lobbyists, joking that the name comes from their propensity for “hanging out in hotel lobbies a lot.” A more appropriate reason for the moniker, however, may be Stokes’ own propensity for fighting for change through his philanthropic work. As the name of the tour suggests, the projects that have been taking place in the cities along the way are geared toward aiding and raising awareness of refugee communities, specifically those displaced by the conflict in Syria.

All of this is part of Calling All Crows, a musician-fueled activist organization started by Stokes and tour manager Sybil Gallagher. The website for the movement describes an effort that “works for a future when the success of live music is measured not only by ticket sales, but by the impact of fans and musicians mobilizing together to make a difference in the world,” a statement that is followed by a photo of a grinning Stokes with an equally jovial black lab in his arms, sitting outside on a farm, surrounded by a multitude of volunteers wielding shovels and pitchforks. The picture seems to exemplify the spirit of organization, which tries to “build community by leveling the playing field between musician and fans,” holding events before the concerts to draw in volunteers to the cause.

Unique tours, like this current mashup of music and activism, are not new for Stokes, who embarked on a living room tour in 2013 in which he played gigs for small groups of fans in their own homes. The tour served as a sort of workshop for many of the songs on Comanche, and now the tunes are getting another work-through with Stokes and his backing band. When asked about the process of going from small venue to large, Stokes says “it’s the evolution of the song, I guess. It starts really simple in the living room shows—or I guess in my own living room, and then in other people’s living rooms. Then you go and record them and kind of flesh them out some, and then they’re their own thing. And now we’re trying to recreate the recording with the band.” With the songs evolving as Stokes takes them from his home to your home and then from the studio to the stage, fans are treated to an uncommonly intimate view into the artist’s process—an appropriate gift from a man who owes much of his past and continuing success to faithful fans and grassroots movements.

Part of that process that Stokes has laid out for his fans via performance and recording is the sometimes difficult task of deciding what songs belong where and how to mold a song to fit a different medium, namely the medium of a full band versus a solo artist. “A lot of it is just trying to get the same sound and feelings, when the songs took on that part of their identity,” Stokes says, referring to his attempts to take the recorded songs and perform them with the band. “And it’s been fun to see which songs are working better than others. There were some songs that worked in the living room tour that didn’t work in the recording process—one of the main tunes that I thought was going to be a seminal part of the album didn’t make it. So you just kind of keep on rolling as the songs redefine themselves.”

Stokes says that both of his regular bands are currently on hiatus, but does hint at doing something with Dispatch later this year. Right now, he is focusing on his solo songs, which are frequently not the same as ones written for his bands. “Most of these tunes, I feel like they didn’t have a home in either of the other two bands,” he says. As he demonstrated with the living room tour, Stokes’ solo work lends itself well to intimate settings, a product of the type of song that comes when not writing for a band. “Typically, with the solo stuff, they’re just more personal,” he says. “I always felt weird in a band saying I did this and I did that, you know, because I wanted to speak for the band. But with the solo stuff, I’m able to kind of draw on small stories in my own life.”

Stokes will continue his tour with east coast dates later this month, then will make a stopover in Toronto before moving south through the Midwest in March, ending with a date in North Carolina. He also came by the Relix offices a few months ago, performing two songs including the Comanche tune “Our Lives Our Time.”