April 2025 Tour Log, Part 2 of 2

Boston -> Portland -> Vermont -> Hudson Valley

Where did we leave off?

Arriving in Boston was VERY STRANGE for me. I didn’t realize how long I’d been away—a few years at least—until I went down the stairs in South Station and the MBTA ticket readers had changed over to the NYC subway style where you just tap your credit card and go. I was born just early enough to dimly remember the changeover from physical subway tokens to plastic cards and paper tickets, and now I’ve apparently lived long enough to see those become outdated, too.

I continued to feel like everything was a little bit different than I remembered. We rode the red line to Alewife and everyone marveled at how abandoned and creepy it felt. It does look a bit worse for wear at the moment. All the stores are closed. Even the dry-cleaners that must have been a front for something is finally shuttered and empty. Crazy stuff.

My mom took this photo of us in ye olde Alewife Station

I’d set up a house concert with the help of two relatively new arrivals to Boston, Preston and Julian, but still wasn’t sure exactly what to expect—as the booking conversation went on I started to get the sense that actually, people are making music again in Boston. There are bands! I’m not sure what’s happened to facilitate this. Maybe a lot of post-COVID moving around? I will say that it is the best place I’ve ever lived for walking and biking everywhere, and I suspect that’s a major draw for the right type of person.

I did not expect the house we were playing in to be quite so big. It was sort of unfathomably big on the inside. Someone had clearly knocked down some walls. The show was easily the tightest-run house show of its size that I’ve ever seen, thanks to Preston, who was very good about getting people on and off stage and keeping set times down. The only glitch was a brief moment where we realized there was no drum hardware in the house! This was largely my fault, as we had initially planned to pack it in our suitcase—I am quite glad we did not do this—and I had said as much before we changed plans to rely on venues/other bands for drum kits. But everyone pitched in to figure this out, we re-ordered the lineup and by the time we were going on again, the drums were sorted (with a chair and a couple of books under the snare). Sounded great!

Maybe it was helped by the combined draw of four bands on the bill, but the house was packed. I think I said later: “more people than I thought could fit in a house that was bigger than I thought any house could be.” Together with our strong first show at the Owl, we were feeling pretty good about ourselves! It was a great program of bands, too: I’d never heard Ribbon or Gr8 Dogs (they said: “we like to go for terrible SEO”) and they both killed it. (So did Ciarra, of course).

In Boston we had enough beds to go around, and everyone finally got a decent bit of rest. In the morning we packed Ciarra’s Prius for the first time and… everything fit! There was some amount of stuff on laps, but none of our drives were that long, so all in all pretty bearable.

We left for Portland, ME, to play a Monday night show at a brewery. We had half-expected to play to no one, and mostly were using the stop as an excuse to visit Amy’s friend Daisy and finally get to see what Portland, ME was all about. But maybe we should have had more faith—Daisy had spread the word and a good sized group of people came to see us, and in the middle of an open mic no less. Thanks, guys!

We stopped into a bar (pub?) that felt very much like some monasteries I have visited: underground, ancient brick walls, mess of melted candles on some kind of chimney or plinth in the center. It was awesome. They had cheap beer for like $3, which felt insane to my Bellingham-cost-of-living-adjusted brain.

In Portland, photo by Daisy

After the gig we spread out onto some combination of blow-up mattresses and couches. Daisy kept bringing out more blow-up mattresses. We would be like, “I think this is enough!” and she would think of another one. (Thanks, Daisy). I had trouble falling asleep—apparently it’s still cold in April in the northeast—and ended up putting all of my clothes back on.

In the morning we loaded the car again while actual snow fell from the sky. Then after a quick grocery store run for some lunch we hit the road. I had expected the drive across New Hampshire to be a pain, but it didn’t feel too long. We did go in and out of a few very snowy areas, but the roads were completely clear.

We arrived at my mom’s in the early afternoon, about two hours before we were set to play a little house concert there. This wasn’t a planned stop in our initial vision of the tour—we had a different gig in Vermont that fell through—but I was happy to have the time to visit, and in fact a lot of people came over to hear us.

We didn’t have a PA for this gig, so our plan was to simply play quietly enough that I could sing without a mic. After a bit of adjustment this worked out great! In some ways it was one of the best feeling gigs to play. Maybe I just really don’t like playing loud…

In an insane coincidence we learned that Woody, my mother’s friend who we’d borrowed a tiny kick drum and hardware from, had lived in the house we just played at in Boston, in the 80s. (We said we’d played a show in Boston. He said where in Boston. We said Somerville. He said was it [the address of the house]? We said, um, yes.) I’d just learned it was some sort of co-op housing for artists, and Woody told us it had been like that even back then. Oh, to have experienced 1980s rent in Boston…

Vermont - you can’t tell, but it was fully winter outside. ~30 degrees

The next day was our off day, except not for Ciarra, who had to go back to work in North Adams—a ways south of Bennington, our next gig. We got going pretty early to allow her time to get home, and made it to our friends’ place in Shaftsbury, where Amanda basically went to sleep in the guest room and did not fully emerge until the next day. I too had run up the tab on sleep deprivation and was feeling pretty out of it.

The kaleidoscopic feeling of tour is really insane—so many new experiences and new places are compressed into tiny little boxes of time. I think Bennington is the point on tour where even on this short run of shows I started to feel like I wasn’t entirely in my body anymore. I think on previous tours we’ve done that haven’t started off with a red eye cross country flights, it’s taken much longer to start feeling that kind of exhaustion, but here it kicked in pretty quick.

I did really enjoy hanging out in the Bennington area for a day or two. Our friends Molly and Rory and Harrison and Kaylyn were excellent hosts and it was awfully nice to see them all. When are you all moving to the west coast?

I went for a walk at one point and listened to some music that had come out, thinking: listening to music—is that something I even do anymore? As far as I can tell I just sit in cars and trains and planes and occasionally play the same seven or eight songs for people. All the facts of my immediate existence had changed completely in the past 72 hours or so, and my entire sense of reality and identity followed.

In the Prius

Anyway. Our show at Bennington College was great. It continued the trend of shows being well attended—back in my day, shows in the Downcaf (Downstairs Cafe?) did not always draw a crowd. I saw some amazing artists play to an empty room there. Or empty, I guess, except for a few weirdos like me coming in to check out the supposedly good band we’d heard about. But our experience was different. Maybe it was that everyone was coming back from long weekend (spring break!) and needed something to do. I think the band mostly agreed that this was probably our best performance of tour—we had the tour-tightness thing going on, where the music felt fairly effortless and we were able to reach above and beyond some of the usual patterns we fall into on stage. And the energy in the room was really nice, which you absolutely cannot take for granted. Henry’s parents came all the way from Rhode Island to see this one! We finally got to hear Ciarra’s set through a decent sound system, and it ripped. A couple of underclassmen were talking in between songs and she cut them off—“I am your teacher now”—and shushed them into silence.

Our last gig was in Catskill, NY at the Avalon Lounge, where I’d never quite managed to play while I was living in Vermont. It lived up to its reputation as a really cool place, complete with an upstairs lounge with all sorts of weird anachronistic furniture and fixtures. I was a bit worried about attendance, but people started to file in as we played the opening set. It was a treat to hear Daniel Kleederman’s mighty power trio do their thing: some of the best bands, in my opinion, are the ones that organize around the most impactful deployment of the major-7 chord, and that was exactly what was going on here. I was definitely reminded a little of the Jeff Buckley band’s wild dynamics, too, from septuple-F Forte to pianissimoissimoissimo-barely-touching-the-hihats.

We hadn’t had a place to stay in upstate NY, but Amy asked around on Instagram and another Bennington alum, Rowan, offered to house us, which was so much appreciated at this point as all the lost sleep had added up and I was starting to come down with a cold. The next day we got a ride from Henry’s friend Sam—also living in the Hudson Valley—to town to catch the train. Not before he bought! Us! Breakfast! Jeez, Sam. Thanks for helping us along.

In fact, I should pause to mention that there’s a particular phenomenon when you go on tour where people are just happy to help out in whatever way they can while you’re passing through. It’s nice! Maybe it’s fun to be a part of something. But also makes me feel a little guilty about not being in a position to pay things back. I think the wisdom on this is to pay it forward, but when you’re on the road and then you’re suddenly given exactly what you need, when you need it—be that food or a bed or just like, saying something nice that turns your day around—I guess what I’m saying is that I’m very grateful for this sort of thing. I don’t ever expect it or take it for granted, which is probably why I spent three or four months feeling sheer financial panic about the prospect of flying to go on tour.

I’ll pause on that to relay the rest:

The train from Catskill to New York was lovely. I forget the Hudson is so big. We got off and made our way through pretty dense crowds to exit Penn Station. It was still relatively early in the day, but I was realizing that whatever I was coming down with was truly upon me, and decided to give up on any plans I had for the weekend and lie in bed. Amy and I watched part of Henry Fool, the Hal Hartley movie—I must get round to finishing—and then I fell asleep, never to return.

Last minute welcome note <3

The next morning I was feeling a little better, and better still when I left the apartment to walk through Prospect Park, which was at last in full bloom. Amy and I went to the Brooklyn museum, at Katy’s (of Raybody) recommendation and looked at a bunch of chairs. I have to say: the curation there seems to be trying something new—grouping art by theme, rather than period or country—and I have to say I’m not sure I’m into it. Really I just have to admit that I like the 19th century paintings of landscapes and flowers and the ocean, etc, a lot better than the more recent stuff, and I want to be immersed in it instead of confronted with massive aesthetic shifts. It’s escapist, isn’t it? I hope that doesn’t make me a fascist.

Afterwards we bought some overpriced lamb over rice and went back to Harry’s apartment. I went out again—my congestion seemed to magically clear every time I walked through the park—and walked around for a while, listening to my new hyperfixation, Delius, and still trying to square my brain with my body.

The next morning I was mostly feeling back to normal, and just in time, too. The Q delivered us straight downtown where we met up with Amanda and Henry at a drum shop. Amanda pointed out some cool $4000-6000 drum kits, and I tapped a $750 ride cymbal with a stick. It sounded good.

After taking whatever combination of trains gets you to Newark, we spent a few hours sitting in the airport lounge, then boarded our Alaska flight without incident (they didn’t bat an eye at the carry-on guitars, and I shut them all in an overhead bin before anyone else could put some bags on top).

And now we’re back, and it’s been three or four days in Bellingham, and to tell you the truth I still feel a bit like I am not really inhabiting my body. I’m hoping as Amanda has suggested that this blog post will help with that.

I guess I’m left with some questions, too. I’m happy we did this tour, but it also was a bit insane to do. Flying to the other coast to play a handful of tiny gigs? Isn’t that a stupid thing to do?

Maybe. I’m not sure. I can’t justify it in any way, but it felt like an important thing to do for some reason. And I don’t think the reason is just ego, or vanity. I don’t think we’re like, really cool for having gone on tour; if anything I’m mostly embarrassed about this whole music thing we do sometimes. It was more about sharing this music—this band—with some further-away friends and in some places I used to live, or always thought I’d go but never did. That stuff was nice to do. And we all had our various connections to things out east. That made it meaningful in lots of different small ways that do add up to something when you zoom out. I don’t think I have the clarity at the moment to see that, though.

I also think I’m just a bit older than I used to be and get more exhausted than I used to do. In my regular life I can bounce back from a few nights of lost sleep with a few days’ rest, but once you get a bit further into the sleep budget I suspect it takes a significantly longer time to recover, as I’m currently experiencing (it doesn’t help maybe that I’ve gone straight back to work).

If you’re curious about the financials, you can ask Amy for the full breakdown, but the gist is it was basically an all expenses-paid vacation for the four of us. Each of us paid for our own flight, and the rest was pretty much covered with income from shows and merch sales. We didn’t expect to be able to pay for our flights with tour money, but we did all get a chunk of money back to offset that some, which was nice. So I’m not financially panicked anymore, although there is some tiny voice inside me that wishes we had somehow made money. Or booked one more really well-paying gig. Or something. But thinking back on the booking process, the tour we put together was basically the only way the tour could have been—getting the logistics to line up was hard enough without specifically worrying about money.

Speaking of logistics, the only way that this tour ever worked at all was thanks to Ciarra’s willingness to lend her car (and drive it too, for that matter). Thanks, Ciarra! You’re a true legend of the open road. And if anyone is wondering, it is possible to tour with five people in a Prius—although you’ll have to leave your drums behind.

All right, that’s enough. I’m not sure what I’ll be up for next week in terms of blogging, but it does continue to give my life a lot of meaning and structure to write these things so I will probably continue to do it. Sorry again for another week of silence, last weekend was during the part where I was in New York and feeling terrible.

Onwards…