Sleeping With Sirens’ rhythm guitarist Nick Martin recently started a successful YouTube channel, on which he likes to share his music, as well as stories from tour. Today, he decided to share a special story in a short video, where he told the story of meeting Pierre Bouvier from Simple Plan for the first time on Warped Tour in 2004 (back with his first band Underminded) and being completely baffled how Pierre performed an such an unexpected act of kindness towards him and his former band. So much so, that it has inspired Nick to continue doing such act of kindness since then.
We wrote down the entire story below, but you can also listen to it from Nick on the video below:
So we followed the Warped Tour caravan on a day off to a hotel where all the Warped tour bands and production were gonna be staying. And we also heard that the hotel was giving a discount for everybody on Warped Tour. So.. we’re like awesome, let’s shower! So we get to the hotel, it’s completely slammed, full of Warped Tour people, bands, production.. everybody’s there. We went to the desk and I said: ‘We would love to get a room, we need to shower. Please help.’ Their response to me was: ‘We are completely sold-out. I’m sorry.’ Talk about having a moment, when you feel like it’s the end of the world and everything is against you. And then we realized we’re in the middle of nowhere. We would have to drive even further to hopefully find another hotel, we don’t wanna waste any more of our day driving… it was not the answer that we were looking for.
But then the moment quickly changes. Someone taps me on my shoulder, I turn around – Pierre, the lead singer of Simple Plan. Let me quickly preface this that Pierre did not know who we were, did not know what band we were in, we had never met before, we were complete strangers. And he tells me: ‘I just overheard your conversation that the hotel is out of rooms, well, I want to help.’ And then proceeds to give me all of their room keys. It wasn’t just one room, it was multiple rooms for the band and crew. My jaw drops and I was speechless. I couldn’t believe that somebody would do that. That they would go out of their way to just give us hotel rooms without knowing who we are or having never met before. He was such a kind soul for doing that. And he wanted nothing in return. It was out of just kindness and knowing and looking at us and seeing how tired we were, how exhausted, how burned out we were. And it stuck with me ever since then and I’ve also given my hotel room key to other bands, who needed a place to shower, needed a place to charge their phones, to decompress and just talk to family. And just to feel like a human being for a day. And I can never thank him enough for doing that.
A few years ago I ran into him. I think it was on the Alternative Press awards. I told him this story from 2004, that he did this incredibly kind thing for me, that has stuck with me ever since. And he did not remember that ever happening but he was still so kind and I thanked him so much for doing what he did and how it meant to everybody that was with us, the whole band, all of our crew. It just goes to show that any act of kindness big or small can completely change someone’s day or change someone’s life in a really positive day.”
