We play music.

We live to play music.

We play music to live.

And we are so blessed. We drive in a Pontiac Montana, a mini-van that is literally the size of Montana. We sleep in abandoned mansions, with refrigerators full of food. We have the coordinates to the mansions sent to us ahead of time, and we open up our little treasure map and we locate the proper spot at the end of the night, and the band member who only had one drink that night drives the Pontiac Montana. The Pontiac MONTANA. Imagine the state of Montana driving down the highway. Presidential candidates campaign in our car because our car is so big that it will be sending seven delegates to the Democratic convention. (Actually, it’s just a little mini-van, but the psychological effect of naming it after the fourth-largest state has had quite an effect on us.)

We are insatiable. We want music all the time. We steal shows. In a sliver of a park in late afternoon in the middle of Denver, just running through some of our quieter songs, people get off work, get off busses, walk across four lanes of traffic to find out what we are doing and buy our cds as the sun sets and we tell them we have to get to Boulder. “I saw you had a clarinet… I love the clarinet!” On our one night off in the first three weeks, we find a dive bar in Spokane and tell the people there that they WANT us to play there but they just don’t know it yet. And we set up on the floor and play. And during the poppiest song in our set everyone in the bar is jumping up and down and I look over to Nathan, but Nathan– sweet violinist with a long cord so he can wander– is out on the floor too, in the middle of everyone, jumping up and down while still playing the violin.

We write poems to our deity The Traveler King, aka Papa Hobo, aka Any Weird Guy Who Comes Up To Us And Says Something Weird. “You know who that was, don’t you?” we’ll say as whatever stranger hobbles away from us and down the street. “That was the Traveler King.” And we’ll each brush off the exchange and realize it for the divine moment it was, instead of the creepy awkward interaction that it seemed at first.

The Traveler King, in case you don’t know, is in charge of everything out THERE, in the WORLD. Everything outside your house. If you hoist drinks to him and write poems to him and read those poems aloud on street corners and then tear them up and throw them into the air, he will be kind to you. He will, as they say, HOOK YOU UP.

And we are so grateful to him, because he has turned the world upside down. And when you’re touring the country playing music, you need the world to be turned upside down. Because the world is a little strange. And so if you go out into the world and you embrace the crappiest situations, in fact SEEK THEM OUT, then there is nothing that can go wrong. And so it is, for us, out here on the road.

Nothing can go wrong. And I am hesitant to even write about this. Even four paragraphs in, I’m still considering deleting this whole thing. But it’s been five weeks, and I have to say that WRONG is RIGHT. And BAD is GOOD. And GOOD is EVEN BETTER.

I haven’t wanted to write about this, because it’s so much easier to write about the bad times. “There were five people at the gig and at one point in the middle of my set, a baby goat walked in, and everyone was so much more fascinated with the goat than with my songs…” but although bad times might be entertaining to read about, they are really painful to live through, so if I can possibly avoid being onstage and wanting to kill myself—even if that leads to a less entertaining tour diary—I’m willing to make that trade. My friends don’t know this yet, however. I call them from the road and they don’t answer. They just text back and say, “I’m fine, I’ll just wait to read the tour diary.” Even my own mother does the same, and I thought she didn’t even know how to text. “tour diary pls” she says…

We are on tour for two months supporting our new album entitled WOOL, which is comprised of piano-based material. Mostly ballads. This has posed a challenge on the road for a few reasons: (1) ballads are quiet and often don’t get people’s attention, (2) I don’t like to play on digital pianos, (3) real pianos are heavy and impractical to carry with us, (4) most venues don’t have real pianos, and (5) if they do, the piano is usually out-of-tune.

But what would life be without challenges? It would just be sort of ick. So we’ve adapted the new songs to the guitar, a real instrument that is also portable and can sometimes approximate a piano. The only difference is that songs that are easy to play on piano are often in keys that are awkward and painful to play on guitar. I’m unwilling to buy a capo out of some foolish sense of pride at having spent too many hours sitting around campfires in Texas watching folk singers play song after song with the same three chords and just moving the capo around. But God bless those folk singers. They weren’t saddled with an unrealistic sense of their abilities as a musician, as I am. And so we have worked out guitar versions of these piano songs, even the ones that are in the key of E-flat, which is a noble and heroic key on the piano and a wrist-straining and tiring one on guitar.

As to the problem that Willie Nelson once sang of—specifically, that, “Sad songs and waltzes aren’t selling this year”—well, that would just have to be worked out on the road, in the bars, in the middle of whatever the Traveler King would bless us with. On the road we usually play rowdy songs, with parts to shout-along to, and moments where Nathan can walk out into the crowd and get people’s attention. That would be harder to do with soft songs.

The first three nights of this spring tour we had the entire band with us, me and six well-dressed and good-looking gentleman. We could walk up to any venue and people would just start handing over their money before we even played a note. After a few of those shows, three of the band had to go back home, and it was just the four of us to continue on. For 50 shows. We had lots of work to do to get good as a band without all those extra handsome and talented men, so we practiced in the van, each of us holding our instrument the best we could, Scott in the back seat playing clarinet, Nathan in the other back seat playing violin, me awkwardly in the front passenger seat playing guitar (let me just get this seat belt out of the way…there!), and William driving the car and singing out his bass lines.

Us all, driving across Wyoming, working out songs. Did I mention that we are insatiable?

Meanwhile, in a similar van to the north, fellow Portland band The Builders and the Butchers were driving through North Dakota. We were two ships charting our way across the amber waves of grain of America, and our ships were destined to collide in Wichita, Kansas in a large warehouse called the Fisch Haus. There lived Eric and Jamie, two inventors who have invented for themselves a spectacular life. She makes a line of lip balm called Chicken Poop, whose package makes clear that it “contains no chicken poop”. He is currently working on designing the fastest bicycle in the world, has a wind tunnel and everything, and the preliminary tests show that it might be able to get up to 80 miles per hour…pretty fast for something you have to pedal! He also carves little wooden cones that go into a guitar’s sound hole that are supposed to help the sound come out better and tame all the strange frequencies that sometimes get created by the boxiness of your average acoustic guitar. Even though I was sick while we were in Wichita and sequestered myself on the bottom bunk of a bunk-bed somewhere on the second floor of the enormous warehouse that was venue, home and factory, Eric would come up to me in the middle of the night with a home-made guitar and say, “Can I show you something?” and halfway through his explanation of vectors and frequencies he would say something like, “Now this is the part that all my mathematician friends say shouldn’t work, but I think it will…” and then he would describe something that you would only think would work in a Dr. Seuss book, but he would say it with such tenderness and passion that you believed it would work too. You wanted it to work. Of the world’s fastest bicycle, he talks about the rear of the vehicle, which includes an optical illusion which is supposed to fool not just the eye but also air molecules, in the hopes that if the air molecules don’t know exactly what’s going on they won’t slow down the bicycle. Dear God, I hope he’s onto something.

The show was to be held downstairs in a little theatre that they built. Behind the stage was a giant parabolic dish, basically an old satellite dish facing out towards the audience so that anything played onstage– even anything whispered– would be directed outwards with more focus and intensity than you would get at your normal venue. And likewise anything in the audience would get directed back up to the stage. Indeed, standing up onstage, I could hear Nathan 50 feet away, rolling a cigarette. Well, if there’s a crowd, I hope they’re quiet!

A couple hours before the show, the Builders rolled up in their similarly green (though not quite as large) mini-van. We realized a week before that they were going to be in Kansas the same time as us and could use an extra gig, so we invited them to play with us in Wichita. Once they arrived in town, we all concurred that we had a similar need to go to a Guitar Center, so I hopped in the van and rode with the band. I was disappointed at first to be riding around in the middle of Kansas with the Builders and Butchers and hear the word “paradigm” spoken.

“Don’t you guys talk about other things?” I asked.

“Like what?” they said.

“Oh you know, like… boobs or something…Not that WE talk about boobs… I just thought you guys would…”

We got back in time to sound check onstage in front of the parabolic dish. And there I was standing, in my sickness everything was strangely muffled but also amplified, and it was fifteen minutes before the show was to start, and Eric was at my feet stapling bunting to the stage, and I looked out at the completely empty theatre of 150 chairs and I had the following thought:

“What if this whole thing is just a delusion? Eric and Jamie convince bands to come here, and they talk about how there’s going to be a big show and how all these people are going to come, but really it’s all just in their head, and there’s really no show, just decorations and lights and chairs and… that’s it. Just us playing our music in a big warehouse on a stage with a parabolic dish, and no audience except for the inventors and our friends who drove many hours to be here. Kind of like in Field of Dreams, where he builds that baseball field in the middle of nowhere and everyone is like, ‘who’s going to come to this? For Christ’s sake, what are you doing?’”

And as the clock ticked closer to show-time and the room was still empty I thought:

“Well, if that’s the case, if this is all a delusion…that’s fine with me. We’ll still play music and either there will be people here
or not and it doesn’t really matter.”

But of course many people came from the thickets of Wichita and they sat down in those chairs and they were so quiet that I couldn’t hear any of them talking during our set, even during the quiet songs, and even considering the fact that a large parabolic dish was behind me. And the crowd ate us up whole, loved us in all our strengths and weaknesses, tossed us around jovially, and a local band played after us and then the Builders and Butchers went on and played without any amplification, save for of course the parabolic dish behind the stage, and at one point Harvey the banjo player turned his back to the audience and aimed his banjo notes right into the dish and they bounced off and went directly into my ear as loud as if it were going through an amp. And the show went deep into the night and we didn’t have to worry about getting in our vans because we were already home, sleeping in a big invention, living in someone’s dream. Our dream. Their dream. All the same dream, for one night. In Kansas.

Links:
Nick JainaSpace
A fast bicycle
A faster bicycle
Parabolic Reflector/Dish

Photo: Not from Wichita, but Manhattan, Kansas.