cleaning product, waffle batter, and death
A second tone poem on touring life; a collaboration with Caroline Shaw; three shows in Texas; Open Music with Nathalie Joachim, plus a conducting debut...
Last Thursday, in Columbus, Ohio, I closed out the initial fourteen-date run in support of Magnificent Bird. It’s been a weird time to be on tour, but ultimately gratifying. And now, it’s good to be home.
Tour is… so many things. It’s mainlining a hot chicken sandwich in the parking lot of Popeye’s, air-conditioning on blast against the numbing heat of Central California, your stomach beginning to ache before you’ve finished—that’s how brutally efficient you’ve become at bisecting a seven-hour drive with a protein bomb. Tour is gas station bathroom breaks, overly sweetened iced coffee, and identical burritos procured from identical Chipotle franchises. It’s the acute sadness of two-star hotels on the outskirts of midwestern college towns, hotels you access in waning late-afternoon light through a labyrinth of service roads etched into strip mall complexes. It’s the odor that filters into your nostrils as you make small talk with the teenager who’s checking you in at the front desk: some combination of cleaning product, waffle batter, and death.
Tour is an ever-shifting series of rituals. After load-in, you set up your gear, connecting cables and power supplies like a fifth grader at a science fair. While you fiddle with your amp, a mating dance transpires between you and the front-of-house engineer. You try to get him—even today, it’s almost always a man—on your side by asking lots of questions about his life, his musical interests. It’s a genuine line of inquiry—a substantial part of what drew you to songwriting is curiosity about lives other than your own—but it’s also a means of generating a surplus of good will that you’ll draw down when you begin to micromanage him, asking for subtle (or not so subtle) tweaks to the way the piano is mic’d, how your voice is EQ’d.
On a normal day, soundcheck takes an hour. On a really good day, it’s over in twenty minutes, and you’ll use the balance of your time to run through bits of songs you messed up the night before, or to continue to refine arrangements that haven’t quite satisfied you. On a bad day, the sound guy is still ringing out bad frequencies—tones that howl in the speakers like aggrieved whales—when the house manager appears, skulking around the floor of the club to let you know, without ever saying a word, that it’s time to open doors. You say a prayer and hope for the best.
Tour is deciding whether to directly acknowledge global tragedies that you know are on the mind of the audience. It’s singing a lyric that sketches a twenty-five year-old national trauma, and realizing as the words tumble out of your mouth that you’re just as accurately describing something that happened yesterday. Your voice catches in your throat.
Tour is feeling via some extrasensory perception that the room is yours, that the sad, sparse chords undergirding your voice have conjured mass hypnosis, that the audience has become, if only for a few seconds, immobilized. These moments make you feel whole, wholly content, refilled and rejuvenated even after thirty hours of solo driving on monotonous freeways in however many days.
After the show, you stand at the merch table, trying to give your full attention to every fan, while at the same time moving things along, both for the sake of your own endurance, and out of respect for the folks in the back of the line. Tour is trying to reconcile the fact that, on the one hand, you’ve barely cracked one hundred tickets in any given city, and on the other, that at least a dozen folks tell you that they’ve flown in for a show, sometimes from a thousand miles away. It is in this moment you realize that you are, for better or worse, a cult artist. Your audience is small—really small—but passionately devoted. You feel grateful for this, even as you wonder how sustainable it is, whether you’ll be able to continue to support your family playing shows at this scale, whether you can hold onto those hundred fans in a dozen-and-a-half cities.
Tour is listening to a young man become flustered, tongue-tied, apologetic, while you sign his album. “I’m just a little starstruck,” he says. If you could, you would refer him to the second paragraph above, to the banal drudgery of what we in the business call “road dog” touring. You would try to collapse the distance between him and you, to remind him that you’re just another mortal collection of cells whose shit smells like shit.
Tour is catching up with old friends in far-flung cities over a post-show drink. Tour is settling up with the venue at the end of the night; delicately repacking records, cds, sheet music; getting everything back into the car, back to the hotel or the house where you’re crashing. It’s the feeling of relief when you close the door to your room, turn out the light, slide under the cool top sheet in a state of satisfied exhaustion. In six or seven hours, you’ll do the whole thing again.
Tour is also gratitude: thank you so much to everyone who’s come out over the last few months to hear Magnificent Bird. I so enjoyed our evenings together. A big thanks, also, to the incredible artists who opened for me along the way: Carla Kihlstedt in Boston, Aaron Embry in Los Angeles, Julie Albers in Minneapolis, Theo Espy in Chicago, Britt Haas and Paul Kowert in Nashville, and Nate Farrington and Teddy Abrams in Columbus. And now, I have some news about what’s to come.
I’ve added three dates in Texas:
June 13 - Ft. Worth @ Tulips, presented by The Cliburn (on sale now).
September 9 - Houston @ Stages, presented by Aperio (on sale June 11).
September 11 - Austin @ 3TEN, presented by Austin City Limits (on sale June 3).
On June 3rd, I’ll host the final Open Music concert of the season, as we welcome Nathalie Joachim to Portland for the premiere of her suite from Fanm d’Ayiti, an album I’ve loved since the moment I heard it. The Oregon Symphony commissioned this new orchestral version, and we’ll discuss it on Friday at the Alberta Rose Theater, interspersed with performances of works by Erykah Badu, Samuel Barber, Donnacha Dennehy, Ted Hearne, Allison Loggins-Hull, Nina Shekhar, Pamela Z, and Nathalie herself. Tickets are here.
On June 21st, I’ll be doing a duo program with Caroline Shaw at the Sarasota Music Festival. We’ll be joined by two string quartets comprising SMF fellows for an evening of music drawn from our respective catalogs. Tickets are here.
Later in the summer, I’ll be at the Britt Festival in Jacksonville, OR, serving as the composer/conductor fellow. This is a super cool program, dreamed up by my friend Teddy Abrams, in which composers get podium time in front of a professional orchestra.
On July 1st, I’ll sing a suite from Magnificent Bird with the festival orchestra on a program that also features Tessa Lark playing Bernstein’s Symposium.
On July 3rd, I’ll make my conducting debut, leading Marquez’ Danzon No. 2.
That’s more or less it for now. Thank you for your support and for subscribing to this newsletter. Please encourage your friends to sign up! And if you’re still dawdling when it comes to the new album, let this link end your habit of procrastination.
What a missive. I liked this "Tour is deciding whether to directly acknowledge global tragedies that you know are on the mind of the audience. It’s singing a lyric that sketches a twenty-five year-old national trauma, and realizing as the words tumble out of your mouth that you’re just as accurately describing something that happened yesterday. Your voice catches in your throat."
You are a story-teller and as your missive tells us, it's not easy telling a story these days, in these times. One has to choose - pay attention or be in my own world. What a terrible choice, right?
Still, you're a brilliant musician and songwriter and composer, so, what else to do, right? Keep it up and don't worry about the capitalism thing - which I guess you do worry about...
I have travelled over 1000 miles to see you, and I'll probably do it again (unless Canada finally wakes up to your brilliance--which I certainly hope happens!). Thanks for all you do.