Wringing Out
Hello, friends! Rob here.
This is it. After a spring dotted with lengthy stints at home, and a summer of weekend fly gigs, we're officially back on tour. Real tour. Three and a half weeks of eat-rock-sleep-drive, crisscrossing miles of country, dancing with thousands of shining faces, making new friends, seeing old friends, vanquishing old foes, and occasionally pausing to take a nap or to purchase an ironic t-shirt.
We're on a bus this tour! That's the dream, isn't it? Wasn't it? There've been a lot of "the dream”s over the years; its kind of hard to keep track. I was talking about my bus excitement with a dear friend of mine (who happens to be, no joke, arguably the world's most famous cross-stitch artist), and when I described my sleeping nook as a "secret chill bunk,” she responded that there must be an entrance to Narnia nearby. My knee-jerk reaction here was the reality check: it's a mattress pad in an alcove roughly the size of a fat man's coffin with a curtain for privacy. However, it occurred to me shortly thereafter that this bunk does take me to a strange, faraway land full of friendship and wonder, where time passes differently and something in the atmosphere makes me a greater version of myself.
Plus, there's all these goddamned talking mice.
In other news, last week's warm-up run was the sweatiest week in the history of this band. We played a leisurely five shows in ten days, including our hopefully forever-annual working vacation in Nantucket (because life isn't always hard), and the average sweat drip was ridiculous. You know it's a sweaty week when you play a festival that literally has the word "hot” in its name and it's only like the third or fourth sweatiest show of the week. Night two at the historic Chicken Box in historic Nantucket was easily the sweatiest show in band history. I was wringing my shirt out after the show was over. My pants were saturated from waist to cuff. I hung them up in the closet of my hotel room at the end of the night, and when I woke up the next morning, they were still damp all the way through. This was a mere ten-day run, for which I grossly overpacked, and I still ended up having to do a load of laundry.
Heat aside, the shows were just great all around. Actually, not heat aside. Heat very much a part. Heat is energy. Sweat is good. It was a good tune-up for the big tour, we had a few days to rest at home, and now we're back on the road forever. After a few confusing days of bus and air travel at the outset, ping-pong-ing from Nashville to Chicago to Massachusetts, we're about to settle into a slightly more stable routine. We'll be in Westport, CT this evening for the Blues, Views & BBQ Festival, then a few off/business days in the area, and then we strike out west(-ish), and then we strike out east again, actually, and then further east, and further north, then kind of back down south and west a little bit, and you know what just look at the dang schedule. I sincerely hope we're coming to a place where you live!
Finally, in keeping with today's theme of "wonderment," yesterday I got to sign something I've never signed before: Homework.
Normally I'm not one to encourage delinquency in today's youth, but she claimed to be a straight-A student cutting herself a small and well-deserved break. Keep on rocking, Rosie. I hope your... I don't know, Prob/Stat? teacher understands.
