You may know that it’s been some time since we wrote our last Tumblr blog for “One Year a Month”. It’s good to set goals (ha), and while we couldn’t quite manage to keep writing every month about the next consecutive year in our career, it feels great to dust off the memories now and get back to work on catching you up to speed. I must admit, I’m brushing through a few cobwebs as I reconnect with how to write a blog entry!
2009- it was a chock-full year, practically bursting at the seams with travels near, far and wide. Knowing we had a little break before Poseidon and the Bitter Bug was going to be released, and Amy would be touring solo, I planned a trip to Southeast Asia in January with Tristin and two of our very favorite friends and travelling buddies, an Aussie couple named Pauline and Dave. During the three-week trip, we went to Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam. Having always had a fascination with the people, culture, and the American war in Vietnam, I felt honored and excited to be able to go there. I was particularly looking forward to experiencing non-Western culture, as I had never been so far away before to a non-English speaking country. In truth, I was slightly nervous. Among our myriad experiences were a visit to the prison where the late Sen. John McCain was held during the war, a flight north to Hanoi to see Ho Chi Minh lying in state, and on a swelteringly hot day, a “tour” of some of the elaborate tunnel systems dug by North Vietnamese soldiers during the war. While we were there, we met many kind people, learned to cook traditional dishes from locals, roamed temples and back alleys, and were treated warmly by our hosts, but I felt a sense of sorrow and American guilt over that terrible war which never quite left me. I was, however, able to be amazed by and relish the awesome street food, the brilliant colors of all the items people carried on their scooters, things you would never imagine being loaded on to a scooter: trees, washing machines, stacked crates of food and beverages, celebratory items for Tet, and so on. It was terrifying crossing a major intersection in Hanoi or Ho Chi Minh City- a combination of complete “Zen flow” and desperate prayer that if you just kept walking through the sea of bikes and cars and scooters and people, you would make it to the other side alive!
While we were in Vietnam, we rented a boat and sailed on Halong Bay, where the rock outcroppings loom like mystical figures from a time long, long ago. We stopped to see a tiny village on the water with a one room schoolhouse and one dog on the docks. The water was very cold and stung my skin as we swam, but it was exhilarating, and I could not get over the vast beauty of Vietnam. I had only ever seen war footage of the Mekong river, so it’s hard to explain the power of hopping on a tour boat down the river, stopping at a village along the way to buy goods from the locals, and ending up exploring a cave at the end of the boat trip.
There are too many memories of that trip to share here, but I have included a couple of pictures- one is of me and Tristin, reading Vietnamese-authored books on a boat in Halong Bay; the other is me eating a bug during a traditional Lao meal we had in Luang Probang. That night I ate bug, fish gut, snake, frog, and bee larvae. These were local delicacies. My favorite were the plain noodles! It was a strange transition back to American life after that trip, but I felt I would one day return to Southeast Asia, and Amy and I had work to do!
So, why not play a Cayamo Cruise? Cruises are a slightly claustrophobic experience for me, but Cayamo and Olivia Cruises through the years have also been a ton of fun, particularly since we get to jam and sing with other musicians. During 2009, we spent a lot of time hanging out and singing with Brandi Carlile and the twins. Brandi, Amy and I would gather in one of the little ship cabins and rehearse songs, and when we did our IG set on the boat, most of the songs were sung with Brandi, singing harmonies and taking verses. Brandi can sing harmony perfectly with anyone, and she was like a harmonic glue with me and Amy. I spent those nights on the ship playing songs with my jaws aching from smiling so much because, really, what is better than singing songs with friends, and when the friend is Brandi, it’s a whole other musical dimension. Along with the music, the deep, deep blue of the deep, deep sea is my favorite living color, and I spent a lot of my time looking over the ship balcony, down to the swirling blue below, marveling at what the natural world shares with us.
Out of nowhere came an opportunity to play our first show in Southeast Asia- a one-off in Singapore! Never before had we flown across the world to play one show! It was a fascinating place, this jam-packed city state. I remember that there were stores and stores and stores- so many shopping places I had never seen, and there were miles and miles of cutting-edge public transport trains. It was also an incredibly clean city. We had heard that chewing gum was against the law. Urban myth? Homosexuality (sodomy to be exact) is illegal in Singapore, an anti-gay law enacted by colonial England in the 1930’s. We interviewed with a queer journalist while there- I felt it was extremely brave of him to speak so freely, but there is a strange mix of extremely stringent rules and citizen conduct laws, coupled with an international cosmopolitan mix of people, and thriving arts, that reminded me of a “don’t ask don’t tell” environment. Singapore is largely a conservative country. The struggle for LGBTQ freedom continues there.
From there, we went to Palm Springs, California to play the Dinah Shore weekend. Back in 2009, I was a women’s golf FANATIC. My GF and I hung out with some women on the tour, and we went to Dinah Shore to follow the tournament as well play music. Here’s the jewel of the crown- Lady Gaga was performing there as well! She would go on to become a stratospheric star (one of my very favorite artists), but in 2009 we shared the stage with her at Dinah Shore. I remember watching her from the side of the stage, even then with glitz and glimmer, and being captivated by her. There are some artists you see and you just know they will go on to bigger, broader audiences and fan followings. It’s pretty fun to look back and remember when they played small venues and how we were there to see them and take in their gift before they became household names. Small venues are so great, because the music is so close- all those energy molecules packed in so tightly and swirling around.
We spent the rest of that year touring much of the U.S. from the Northwest, to California, the Southwest, Mid-west, Southeast and on up to New Hampshire and the Northeast. We decided to hold food drives during those concerts. People could bring food goods in for people and food goods in for pets. We knew that many people were experiencing food insecurity because of the 2008 economic crisis, and we worked with the group Rock for a Remedy who completely organized the drive and had volunteers in each city to collect the food and money and to let people know which groups, foodbanks or animal shelters for example, in their communities would receive the contributions.
When we face a problem head on and share what we have, and we sometimes do that in the music arena, the result is a powerful sense of community, rather than isolation and personal struggle. I’m so thankful to groups like Rock for a Remedy that have the organizational infrastructure to make these kinds of community efforts achievable. Someone carries the box of food out of the venue and gets it into the hands of someone who is hungry. There are always so many “invisible” people behind the scenes doing the hard work of making the goal realized. It was true from the beginning and is still true that concerts that benefit people or animals or groups in need of assistance or amplification are the very best concert experiences Amy and I have. It is always our community of listeners who rises to the occasion and takes part!
In October we flew across the pond to tour the UK. Touring the UK is one of my favorite things to do as an IG. We were driven on a tour bus by the intrepid and always hilarious Johnny (the one of “Olympia Inn”). It’s always creepy and exciting to have the bus drive onto the Ferry to get to Ireland. In the very old days, I would sleep on the bus while parked on the ferry-even though you’re not supposed to do that. Though it was dark, and you could feel the motion of the sea, hear the mechanical drone of the ship’s engines, and know that you were in a ship’s underbelly, inside a bus, I always opted for more sleep. Getting off the bus and onto the upper part of the ship cut into my sleep. I have never done well without proper sleep (8 hours at least), so the hardest part of touring for me has always been body fatigue. Once I’m over the bad jet lag I always experience, I’m exhilarated to be touring in a country outside the U.S. On that tour, we had Carolyn Snell for the first time as our tour manager. We met her when she was TM-ing Brandi. We have her to thank for all of the awesome pics she took on this UK tour. We went on to become lifelong friends, and she introduced us to Thistle Farms in Nashville, a nonprofit social enterprise dedicated to helping women survivors recover and heal from prostitution, trafficking, and addiction. Often, we meet friends along our travels who introduce us to organizations who address the most critical needs of the people or animals they serve- a completely organic journey into all of the issues Amy and I have been involved with over the many years.
I got very sick on the UK tour. It feels awful to get sick on tour, an agonizing feeling not to be able to do my best during a show. Even though there is no blame for getting sick, I always feel like I’m letting Amy or the audience down. Carolyn and I still laugh about me handing her my sweaty, gross stage shirt after a show when I was really sick. She said “ewwww”, took it, and held it as far away from her on the hanger as she could. I guess her honesty solidified our nascent friendship! The other thing about getting sick on tour is that you never want anyone else to get sick. So, when we had Clare Kenny and Carol Isaacs come over from London to play with us, I tried so hard to keep my distance from them- even though I love them both with all of my heart and so rarely get to see them.
I look back on that tour and all of the wonderfully crummy dressing rooms, lack of coffee, jacket potatoes from food stands, beautiful people, exuberant fans whose distinct accents you could hear as they sang the words, thrill of cultural change, and I think about being sick. That’s how bad it felt to me. Obviously, that is self-involved and way out of proportion, but there it is. I’ve learned to go a little easier on myself when I get sick now on tour, but it really sucks!
2009 was the year we released Poseidon and the Bitter Bug whose name came from our very funny and gifted producer, Mitchell Froom. He’s like, “jeez there’s a lot of bummer stuff here (I’m paraphrasing); you should call the album Poseidon and the Bitter Bug”. We did. We decided to make PATBB a double album- one-part full band arrangements, another part all acoustic arrangements. These songs leant themselves quite well to the stripped-down versions. Alison Brown joined us to play banjo and “banjola” on some of the acoustic versions. Her banjola solo on “I’ll Change” is one of my favorite musical pieces on all of our albums combined. There was something about the poignancy of that song out of personal pain, along with Alison’s sensibility, and the sound of that particular instrument that reached inside me and wouldn’t let go. I often ponder about why certain chords or instruments resonate uniquely to different people. For instance, I absolutely love the sound of a drum sidestick on the snare pattern.
I love the songs on Poseidon. “Fleet of Hope” was the first song I wrote after a terrible, debilitating bout of writer’s block. “Digging for Your Dream” was the first song of mine we recorded to a loop that ran through the entire song. “I’ll Change” is a ballad I never get tired of playing live (not all songs are like that). Amy wrote classics like “Second Time Around”, “Sugar Tongue” and “Driver Education” which she had also recorded as a solo song. One thing I loved about Mitchell Froom’s production is that no musical part is overdone, overplayed, or conflicts with other parts. Each part fits with and has its place in relation to the other parts. He is the king of simplicity and the perfect note, in my opinion. Besides that, he has a wonderful sense of humor and always kept things flowing in the studio- a sure and steady captain.
SO- the end of a decade and the precipice of a new one. Traveling was the key- new people, new experiences, new challenges, new activist mentors and groups to get involved with. Every stop along the way was an adventure and a chance to reflect on the bountiful life that music has given me.
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