Your early Independence Day present is a quick one-shot tour diary from our friend Michael Apinyakul of Shoeshine Blue (Fun fact: Blue is one of three colors featured on the American flag!).

It’s good to go home. To re-tread old paths through old woods. To view the whole of your own story and attempt to understand where you’re at in the arc. If you’re lucky, you see you’re about to go through a transformation, entering the part of the story where you really start kicking ass.

I only played a small handful of shows on this trip to Missouri, but they were meaningful shows, where a few songs reinvented themselves, as they often do when they travel. An inflection changes, a chorus professes its love for itself, a verse gets quietly forgotten. Some songs kick and scream the whole way. But as transformation was happening for the songs, I hoped for a little of that gypsy magic to rub off on me as well.

I left Portland feeling like shit. The planks were ripping from stern to bow. I was hoping to return emotionally triumphant. Naked and wrapped in pelts and furs. Transformation. I turned 32 on the night of my first show in Columbia (MO). People were partying, but there was a dedicated pocket of listeners parked in front of the stage. I drank heroically and felt younger for a bit, then older, then very very tired. The next morning I woke up feeling exactly the same as I did the night before.

I took a trip to Kansas City, where a good friend and former bandmate has bought a gigantic antique house for pennies on the dollar. Moving through the house was like swimming in an aquarium. You feel strange compulsions to move slowly through a doorway, or climb the steps fashionably, simply because it would be aesthetically pleasing to someone watching. We do, after all, put little castles in fish tanks so we can watch them climb the spires. Three cats and three people live there and I thought we ma de a handsome habitat. I woke up each morning in Kansas City feeling younger than the day before.

The show I looked forward to the most was on my last night in Missouri. I reconnected with my old friend Chris Canipe, who—when push comes to shove—is one of the greatest songwriters I’ve ever met. We threw the show together in a week and it was mostly promoted by word of mouth. It was at an ice cream parlor that puts booze in the milkshakes. This was promising. The place is called Sparky’s, named after the owner’s bulldog. Outside there is an astonishing lifelike statue of Sparky chained to the tree. The real Sparky came to our show and sat on the other side of the tree. It was hard to tell which version of Sparky was more lifelike, but in all honesty, the statue seemed happier to be there. The show went really well and Chris’ new band “Malone” is fantastic. Everyone left with belly aches from the spiked milkshakes, but they were musically satisfied and something about ice cream really makes people listen to the lyrics.

So all is said and done for this trip. I am not wrapped in pelts and furs, but I’m coming back much sturdier, and the songs are held together with sixpenny nails. They’ll hold and I’ll hold and the ship still floats and steers true. My layover in Albuquerque is long enough to qualify me for state residency, but I’m able to sit and write this tour diary. As the generic voice overhead instructs us not to watch anyone else’s baggage, a sweaty middle-aged woman abandons her wheeled luggage just outside the bathroom, daring it, and all of us, to grow up and fend for ourselves.

Links:
Shoeshine BlueSpace

Photo by Erin Berzel