If you’re in motion, you can’t stop
(You can read this text in Swedish here.)
Many of the people I talked to from the contemporary European dance scene in connection with this project, referred to the music world for examples of consecutive tours. Therefore, I wanted to speak to someone with experience from music tours, and got in touch with Sara Parkman. Among other things, she told me what it’s like travelling all over Sweden to play. She also told me about music as a calling and the utopian potential of band relationships.
Sara Parkman:
I tour mostly in Sweden and have done so since I was fifteen. I lived in Härnösand then, and was a part of a folk rock band called Kraa. We travelled as part of cultural projects aimed at encouraging young people to keep going (such as Musik Direkt and Ung kultur möts, state-funded projects for young people). It was the best thing I had done: travelling by night train and getting to know other teenagers in Sweden who had dreams about making music. We played in community youth centres around all of middle Norrland. The county administrative board is holding an 8th March celebration! The governor will speak! Come and play! That was when I started taking instruments along by train, and I never looked back.
I think I register around a hundred and fifty per diems a year, so I’m travelling for work approximately one third of the time. I travel by train or car. Our company policy is to not fly nationally, or in Europe unless it’s really justifiable. Two years ago, we were still flying, because that was before we had our policy. I went to Scotland to visit a Christian community for a project about choral singing that I was involved with, for instance.
My experiences when travelling keep changing. This year, I’ve noticed how many different things Sweden can be. It’s about social conditions in different places, the way bodies look, their clothes or jokes, if they have a local health centre, if the community hall is messy or clean. I can get pissed-off about inequalities, but also impressed by the diversity. We share a language, but the history of Scania is different from the history of Stockholm or the history of northern Sweden. It’s nice to be reminded of that.
Touring is different depending on the genre. I’m a folk musician, but I move in various economies. I did two tours with Riksteatern (the national touring theatre of Sweden). As a folk musician, you can play in schools, and there is some public funding for associations that book concerts. Then there are the Regional Music Institution organisations that can invite you to play in the whole county, which means you get paid fairly well and you do consecutive tours. But you’re your own driver and you rig your own sound system. It’s not like being hired by a classical city orchestra. Then you don’t tour that much at all. It’s also not like being a pop musician under some big label. Then there might be a tour bus and a tour manager. I was only ever in touch with tours on that scale at the major theatre institutions.
I feel a bit like I’m hacking the system when I get into the theatre economy, it’s much more stable. They arrange travel and accommodation for you. You don’t have to be on top of things or plan much at all. You also get away from having new social relationships in every new place because the tour managers take care of all the contacts for you. In terms of health, that’s comfortable. And yet, there’s a down side. The more professionalised and specialised it becomes, the less I get to meet everyone involved. But if I have some gig connected to theatre every year, that gives me more freedom for the rest of the year.
I try to say no to a lot of things nowadays that I used to say yes to before. You learn what is worth doing and what isn’t. It’s not worth going to New York for a weekend to play at a boring office party for a tech company, even if you get a lot of money. It’s also not worth sitting on a train for sixteen hours to play for no one. The travel doesn’t justify the end and the end doesn’t justify the travel. But a part of me thinks that everyone should try sleeping on a gym floor, getting a beer ticket as your only payment. It’s part of the learning experience.
You learn a lot about your limits through trying. I realise I get tired faster now than before. Maybe it’s my age, or it’s about acknowledging what I actually have the energy for. I used to max out more before, and then I would break down after. I used to spend my travel time preparing texts, producing. Now, I just travel. And I’ve started taking better care of my body: running, making sure I eat properly, not drinking too much alcohol. And I started realising that if I work fulltime, I might not have the energy or need to meet everyone everywhere.
I usually bring my own pillow. It’s good to have slippers, tuning fork, nail scissors… And then I have my diary with drawings and cut-out images. I’ve had it since I was seventeen. Everything is in it, work and life. It’s like carrying a part of my mind. If I lose the diary, I panic. It’s a part of my home.
Home is also Stockholm, where I live. I used to say home was Västernorrland. The last years I haven’t been there much, but I always go back to work. I’m quite often in Bergslagen, in the Ställberg mine. Some years I’ve been there for four months. That creates real relationships that give a sense of home.
I grew up in a Christian conference centre in Dalarna. My father is a priest and my mother is a deacon in the church of Sweden. So much of my relation to music comes from church. The music is part of the liturgy, the rituals. Everyone who comes to church practises music. People came from the whole diocese of Västerås and from the whole world for courses and conferences. There were in-service courses for churchwardens, youth camps and communion camps. It was also like a new home for people who needed to get away from their old lives, for example alcoholics. You shared your everyday life with everyone there. The days were structured by morning prayer, noon prayer and evening prayer.
There was a strong focus on congregational and choral singing. Because there were so many teenagers at the conference centre, there were hits, often songs that were influenced by pop or rock. You could lie on the floor with your head on someone’s lap and sing in the chapel: “Be not afraid”, “Glory to the father”.
People also came there with music in different ways. My father, for instance. He travelled a lot in the eighties, especially to South Africa. He and his friend brought music back and introduced it here in Sweden. There is often a journey in the music: It tells something about where people have been.
When it comes to folk music, the place of origin is often very concrete. I can say: “This song is from Bingsjö” or “This song is after Anders in Övik”. Last time I met Anders in Övik was three weeks ago. I toured to Övik and he came to see me. He is the one person who taught me the most about folk music from Ångermanland. But I think the places are always in the music, no matter if it’s a place connected to a specific person or a geographical place or an emotional place or a historic place.
Travel is a part of folk music’s heritage. Take my playing buddy, whose father went on an exchange trip in the US with a folk music association from Järvsö. In the US, he met the woman who would become the mother of my playing buddy. She was also interested in Swedish folk music. They fell in love and moved to Hälsingland. So the trip with folk music brought them together, but also it made them end up in Järvsö. People travel and meet, but they don’t let go of their local heritage. I think folk musicians return home after studying to a much higher extent than other musicians. Then you can continue telling the story of that place; it’s integrated in your music and identity.
My playing buddy also moved back to Järvsö after we graduated from the Academy. She had been more homesick than any of us when we were on tour. For a long time, she was always the one who arrived last and went home first, while I was the other way around. Then it changed for both of us. But she still lives there, and I never moved back to Norrland.
I often get asked if I can come and talk about rural or northern Sweden. But I don’t feel I’m qualified. I’ve lived in Stockholm for nine years. I think the institutions turn to me because they don’t have anyone else to ask, and also because the rural areas are so impoverished. Urbanisation has been going on in Sweden since the fifties, so for each generation the rural areas are more and more diluted. When I grew up in Härnösand, the conditions for working in the arts were better than they are now. There were more active people, more organisations. So when cultural institutions want to invite someone with a rural perspective, there are actually fewer people who are active there than before. And the decline of rural areas won’t be stopped by casting light on power inequality or more representation of people from these areas in conversations. This is primarily an economic issue, not a social one.
I know a lot of people in Sweden. Wherever I go on tour, there’s always a friend or a relative. Travel is a way of keeping these relationships alive. I get to see their lives, their kids growing up. Many of my friends have similar lives. It’s understood that it might take months until we meet. Some of them, I’m in touch with over the phone or the Internet, others I only meet when we are in the same place.
On tour I also meet people who have been in touch with my family, especially in middle Norrland: someone confirmed by my father, baptised by my grandfather, my great-grandfather, or my grandmother’s father. My church family has been everywhere, because back in the day, priests rarely stayed in one place for more than five or ten years before being relocated. The clerical profession was a calling, not an ordinary job where you choose where you work, like it is now. When you were ordained, you gave up your free will. If the diocese wanted you to move to Rönnefors a hundred kilometres north of Östersund, then you did.
Also, as an artist, you need to feel some kind of love for going where service calls. It’s both curiosity and fear of stagnating that keeps me in that love. If you’re in motion, you can’t stop. That I see this profession as a calling also means that I often feel like a mediator rather than a sender, a vehicle for what needs to be told. When the music works, I feel like I’m channelling light from above. That feeling can cause dissonance when I meet a moved audience and people who want to come and thank me afterwards. My feeling is that it wasn’t me who did it. Not that I’m saying it’s Jesus or God, but it’s just not me.
Music left deep traces in my life, not only because music is important to me, but in more ways than I previously thought. This spring, I’ve been on a long tour. There were people everywhere whom I had known for many years. I feel rich being at home in so many places. And yet, I’m scared of becoming lonely. I’m just thirty, it’s still okay to be on the road, but what about when I’m forty-five? Maybe everyone will have kids and nuclear families even though they said they wouldn’t. What if I discover I wish I had got on that train but missed it because I’m always on the road?
All my dreams have been about playing: career dreams as well as relationship dreams. Imagine playing in a band, imagine getting the acknowledgement of being accepted at the academy of music, imagine having your best playing buddy. Those dreams have informed all my choices. So, have I forgotten that others dream of finding a partner or buying a house, and because they dream of a house, they’ve been saving money for ten years?
There have been times when I considered doing something else, becoming a journalist or a nurse. I’ve even sent off applications, but then I realised I don’t want to. I wanted to play instead. A really serious game. My performance anxiety is no game, but when everything works and there is a flow, it’s like being a child. I can’t imagine doing anything other than music. Half my life, I’ve been doing this. I grew up with music, with my playing buddy Samantha, with my first band. Music is the first time I got drunk, the first time I fell in love. Everything I have was created in these rooms, rooms that I’ve often travelled to, rooms that I’ve been in with band mates.
The band community is interesting from a social perspective. If you you look at what kind of music gets attention today compared to twenty years ago, there are a lot of individual pop artists or DJs – fewer boy bands, girl bands or rock groups, than when I grew up. Community isn’t as pronounced as a trope. This, I think, makes groups of friends in our society even more relegated to youth: before the age of nuclear families.
JP Nyström, a folk band from Gällivare that has been around for 42 years, recently released an album with music from all their time together. They asked me to write something for it. So, I wrote about the band as a radical and utopian dream of community. One of them said to me, “Love comes and goes, but band mates are forever.” Of course it’s not true for everyone that band mates are forever. But if you have a band, there are expectations on you that might make you more inclined to set the relationship straight. If you hadn’t been band buddies, you might not have continued being friends in the same way. You would have preferred to just leave some conflicts unresolved.
On tour, professional and relational matters can clash. You hang out in groups where people have known each other different lengths of time. Then you have to navigate in that and not assume that everyone can be equally close just because you’re all in the same group.
It’s more complicated with the ones you are closest to. The relationship is hard to categorise. You live together for two months and share everything but your bed. It’s almost like you’re married: You’re somehow the top priority for each other when you travel, despite not being together or in love or even wanting to sleep with each other. And then, when you return home, you might still be close, but there are others who come first. Maybe a partner or a grandmother – someone who isn’t me. Before, that would sometimes make me sad and jealous. Now I think I’m better at coping with that separation, and at sorting the band relationship in the “right” way: I understand what it’s expected to contain.
At the same time, I want to give the band relationship a special status, a role of its own in my life. I’m very happy that my playing buddies Samantha and Hampus were in my grandmother’s photo album before she died, because they are very important people to me. At my grandmother’s funeral, Samantha was my “plus one”. That went without saying, also because she and my grandmother had a relationship of their own.
The band or the playing relationship is like a parenthesis where something else gets to exist, something this isn’t a friendship, something that isn’t an erotic relationship, but still contains so much. Playing with someone, being in the same flow, creates a strong intimacy.
