Klactoveedsedstene
As we carve our way through Colorado's increasingly familiar and arrestingly scenic highway system on our way to Aspen, I make a grave mistake: I start thinking about things. Exactly a month ago, we were driving the exact same rented Sprinter through the exact same mountains down to Taos, NM and back up to Lyons, CO. I can't help but feel a twinge of deja vu. Tour life is cyclical in nature. Shows come and go in peaks and valleys that correspond predictably with the calendar year. Mardi Gras. Jazzfest. Summer festival season. Heavy tour in the fall. Break for Thanksgiving. New Year's Eve. Sometimes the cycles are longer. Play a festival one year, don't play it the next, play it again the third. Every two or three years we block off some studio time. Zoom out far enough, and you can see the distinct, intervallic crests of a thousand perfect sine waves. There's a pretty steady rhythm to just about everything we do, with perhaps the most noteworthy exception being the brief and unpredictable lifespans of our touring vehicles.
On the flight back from Seattle at the end of our West Coast run earlier this year, I was thumbing absently through Southwest's in-flight magazine when I came across an article titled "How to Travel Back in Time.” The content of the article isn't particularly relevant here, as it was really just a grab-bag consumer guide written with a bit of personality, but I couldn't help but smirk at the title. I know exactly how to travel back in time, I thought. After all, a month ago, I had skimmed the very same article at the beginning of that tour. You just have to encounter something that bridges the past with the present.
Right now, I'm sitting in a van with some friends on my way from Denver to Aspen. In a way, it's just another drive, but at the same time, it's a bridge. Wending our way through the Rocky Mountains, I don't only feel the residual runner's high from the morning and the dehydration of adjusting to the altitude and my own excitement at being back in the fold (I've missed a few shows this month due to weddings). I can also feel the memory of our first wide-eyed trip through Colorado, three vans and what feels like several lifetimes ago, when we would all occasionally break out into choruses of "ooh”s and "whoa”s at what surely was a forever of mountains, each more staggeringly beautiful than the last. I particularly remember one afternoon on that trip where, when not gaping at natural splendor, I was listening to Gustav Holst and reading The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, which only served to multiply my sense of discovery and awe.
-Originally written on June 29, 2015, during, unsurprisingly enough, a long drive.
Hello, friends! Rob here.
We're actually in New York! We're not in Colorado! I wrote that opening section in the van about two weeks ago, and I couldn't find a way to fold it into the context of me writing words now and posting them today, so I was just kind of like "ehh whatever I'll just throw it in at the beginning.” This whole entry is basically comprised of disjointed, piecemeal sections that were written days apart from one another because lately I haven't had a lot of time to really digest events and turn them into words that make for good reading. So here's more of that kind of stuff instead:
We stayed at this awful hotel last week. It actually billed itself as a "Hotel and Plaza,” but I'm not so sure about the "plaza” part. I want to say that this is an insult to plazas everywhere, but then my integrity as a pseudo-journalist kicks in and reminds me that, strictly speaking, I don't technically know the definition of the word "plaza,” and maybe plaza is an old Italian word meaning "place of ominous stains,” in which case this hotel would have been a sterling example. Maybe it means "dimly lit murder hallway,” or "cardboard towel factory.” Both of those could also be the kind of plaza that this plaza was. It's rare for me to complain about the quality of a hotel room. But then it's also rare for me to have to remove the lid from the tank of a hotel room toilet and fiddle around with that floaty thing in order to get it to flush.
Lately I've been wondering about hotels like this. Is the state of the room the result of a hands-off approach on behalf of the hotel's proprietors, who may simply live out of state, or is this a case of calculated neglect, where the cost of upkeep is kept deliberately low so as to better serve the ultra-budget consumer niche? Is this hotel run by a cynical would-be slumlord who deliberately cuts corners on maintenance and pockets the savings, or is there some earnest family doing their honest best to keep the place open on a precariously tight budget and if I think it's bad now I should've seen it before they got here? What is going on? How do rooms get like this?
My mother must have asked herself the very same question on a weekly basis when my brother and I were teenagers.
Anyway, you may have heard a handful of vague, unsubstantiated rumors that we have some kind of thing going on this week. Well, it is both my duty and my privilege to announce that those rumors are true, and that, starting Friday, Men Amongst Mountains will be a real thing that exists! You will be able to go to places and get a Men Amongst Mountains of your own!
Weirdness aside, I have to say, we love this album. We love the living crap out of this album. We love it so hard that if some criminal mastermind fired a gun at this album during a showdown on the rooftop of a skyscraper during a midnight thunderstorm, we would all seven of us jump out in front of this album, stopping the bullet, saving its life, and allowing it to resume the fight with renewed vigor and ultimately punch the villain off of the roof, where he would more likely than not fall through a skylight and land poetically upon a symbol of his own wealth, like a big stack of champagne glasses or a statue of himself. And then this album would be able to cradle us, gasping and wounded, in it arms and resuscitate us with a single kiss, using the power of love. That's how much we love this album. Also, I probably shouldn't have started this paragraph with the phrase "weirdness aside...”
I'm sorry. I'm just a little out of it at the moment. This week has been and will continue to be an unrelenting torrent of interviews, meetings, tapings, filmings, and all other sorts of -ings. We've been in New York for a few days now, running ourselves ragged and literally working our pants off promoting the upcoming release. Tonight, we have our second of two shows in The City, this one in Music Hall of Williamsburg. In short, everything is pretty great and that's about it. Bye!
