On Tour with Duncan Sheik

Greetings from I-20 West,

I'm watching the hills roll by through the window of the bus as I simultaneously surf the internet - okay, the internet is r e a l l y s l o w but, c'mon, we're going 65 miles an hour on a highway. The fact that this can be happening at all proves that we are truly living in an age of miracles (a beaming shaft of sunlight illuminates me as I type that - actually not, I'm fictionalizing my memoirs in a shameless attempt to get on Oprah. If you have no idea what that means, consider yourself lucky to have escaped the 24 media machine that is our culture).

This is Day 3 of the 5 week saga out on the road playing shows opening for Duncan Sheik and it's been nothing but enjoyable so far.

We've played two shows (26 to go). The first night was in Boone, NC, a place so far up in the mountains away from anything else that there's no doubt in any of our minds that this is where the phrase "the Boonies" gets its name.
And yet, this is the second time I've played there (the first being in September on the Jump, Little Children tour).

And that wasn't even the first time I was in Boone - - I was there just after high school when two friends got married. The bride came from Boone and I remember the night before the wedding there being a jam session with a bunch of her, well let's face it, you'd have to call them "kinfolk", who played bluegrass and kicked the hell out of our young, Michiganian rock and roll asses.

Boone is, being way up in the mountains and all, postcard beautiful. It was also (due to our ignorant northerner preconceptions) surprisingly - which is to say wickedly, bitterly, bitingly - cold. I'll try to put up the photo of the frozen water-wheel outside of the hotel where we had a day room ("day room" is tour-speak for "hotel room that you have (to share) for an hour in the middle of the afternoon to take a quick shower before going on to the venue").

The show went well. I'm doing this tour as the first of three acts on the bill (the second act switches every week or so), so there's definitely a concern about playing to nothing more than the staff, but about 2/3rds of all the people who came were there for my set, it was received well and I had a line of folks coming up to get merch and say hello after the set.

Okay, it felt icky to type that last sentence, but it's a reality of my life at this point - putting up decent numbers in terms of cd sales and the dreaded names on the mailing list is the de facto standard for how "successful" this tour will be judged by those folks in positions that allow them to judge things like how well my tour is going. It's not even really about the dollars that come in from cd sales (which for me on this album are much less than on my previous album because I have to buy them from the ditributor at a much higher cost than when I call Discmakers to press 'Fidelity' myself), its just an indicator of whether anybody out there is connecting with what you're doing. This is another reason why having a generation of people growing up thinking music is free (i.e. downloading) is troubling for musicians like myself who are trying to eke out a living doing it.

Last night we were in Nashvillle at the Belcourt Theatre. People come in and sit in comfy seats - this is a place where there’s concerts, not a band playing in a bar.

Which brings me to one of the happy realities of bus tours - the fact that someone is taking on the expense of renting a tour bus means, by simple fact of economic reality, that you play in nicer places - places which have earned the right to be referred to as “venues”. Places with real backstage areas, Places where they fill at least part of your rider. Places that might even have showers. Places, it goes without saying, that I’m not very accoustomed to playing.

Anyway, what can I tell you? Nashville. Music City, USA. Playing in a town where people value music and people who play it makes you realize that you don’t often play in towns where people value music and the people who play it. Not a lot of places where you’re talking to people after the show and they ask you about finger positioning on the fretboard.

More to come.