I felt like I had embarrassed myself at a moment when I’d had something to prove. It was like getting called up to play with the “big boys” (or girls!!) and I felt like I hadn’t been able to hold my own. I was caught up in the drama of feeling exposed, until Taylor lightened my load. After the show, she came into my dressing room and was graceful and sparkly and complimentary and only celebrated our performance. It was almost like saying, “Yeah, sure, that one part was whatever, but the rest of it was so good!” She shared a story about a similar situation she’d had on an even bigger stage with even bigger artists, and by doing so, let the air out of my mistake. By treating the mistake with so little weight, it actually became weightless. It was a learning moment for me, and I took note, and will put that into practice again.
The people who see the good, the bad, and the ugly up close and personal are the members of my touring family; my band mates and crew members who have been there every step of the way. The names and faces have changed a few times over the years, but the bonds that form are remarkable. Some of these folks were my closest confidants during the time when my life changed the most dramatically, around the release of my first record in 2007. They were in the trenches with me, carrying keyboards and cajóns and acoustic guitars into conference rooms at radio stations, begging people to come out to our shows. Over the next few years, we were lucky enough to witness vans and trailers turn into buses, and dirty little rock clubs turn into quaint little theaters and then giant stadiums. All of our lives changed a lot during that time. My little family. You don’t forget that.
Javier Dunn (left), Daniel Rhine, myself, Josh Day, and Eric Robinson in Eureka, 2010
Javier Dunn played guitar beside me for many years and was my heart for so long. I fell in love with him alongside making the music, and he held my hand through many of my hardest moments by inviting me to search myself for the answers, and spent almost a decade with me in music. Fiercely independent and funny as hell, he was an essential ingredient to the alchemy of our life on the road, and my life in general.
I met Josh Day when he covered a gig for another drummer in 2003, and after that first show together, he sat behind the drum set with me for close to ten years. He is my life-loving Southern Leo, bighearted and supremely sensitive, and we were like brother and sister. We still are. We fight like it sometimes, but love each other through it all, and over the years he lifted my music (and our spirits) with his steady hands and, many times, a jar of moonshine.
Daniel Rhine was the bass player who finally fit. I went through about eleven different bass players until Dan finally slid into place seamlessly as if he’d always been there. He is steady and quiet, but can be rowdy when you least expect it. He reads books about John Adams FOR FUN and likes long walks, Scrabble, beer, and Javi’s jokes. He elevated the music, made me smile, and also has a large head, which he won’t mind me mentioning here. Hi, Dan.
Some folks were with me for years, some for only a short time (for lots of colorful reasons). One crew member tried to crawl inside of the overhead compartments on the bus when he got drunk. Another got high in Amsterdam before a show and left his post at the side of the stage during the show because he “got hungry.” Most added something unique and important to the tour, and it’s just the way life works; even the best things don’t last forever. Sometimes the change is of our choosing and sometimes it’s not, but touring reminds me everything is always in motion. Good stuff gets worse and bad stuff gets better, so you’re better off to spend a little time making friends with all of it.
Daniel Rhine (left), Javier Dunn, and me at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, October 9, 2010
Just as being onstage is unpredictable, anything can happen behind the scenes, and usually does, so choosing good people to share the road with is essential. A sense of humor and a good attitude are always helpful along the way. We are on the front lines of each other’s lives with only a few feet between us, on a bus, for weeks and sometimes months on end. We are together in airports and truck stops and bus lounges for hours and hours. We can’t help but swap hearts, because sometimes the displaced feeling that comes with constant motion breeds a particular brand of honesty. Or playfulness. Or boredom. Or sometimes you order an assortment of 250 knives and two Samurai swords from a middle-of-the night infomercial and send them to your tour manager’s house, because vodka. (Sorry about that, Trey.)
During our summer tour of 2014, on the Little Black Dress tour, our bus broke down incessantly. We logged twenty-two different breakdowns and/or issues with the bus in a six-week stretch. This unfortunate situation brought most of us to our breaking point. My poor tour manager and bus driver spent more hours dealing with this than anyone else, but everybody felt the strain of the constant breakdowns. It happened so often, it prevented us from sleeping, and the extra travel was hard on our bodies and our morale. I have to admit that and my humor ran out toward the end of the tour, and made me hate just about everything. I wouldn’t have been able to handle the stress of that without my band and crew who all pooled together to make it work. Chris Morrissey, my musical director, favorite comedian, and one of the best decisions I ever made, remembers our bus:
* * *
CHRIS MORRISSEY BASS/MUSICAL DIRECTOR
We were told that this bus was the bee’s knees. It was the bee’s knees in a beauty contest. In the getting-us-to-the-next-gig contest, it was some other kind of knees. Former-running-back knees. We learned this the hard way. Repeatedly.
I don’t remember the first time we broke down. I remember a few in the middle. One featured being rescued somewhere in the Deep South by a tiny school bus. We all still found it funny at that point, laughing our un-slept asses off in that little thing. We waited at a truck stop and ate hospital-grade breakfast in our sweatpants, and when we climbed back onto the bus, we all had gifts from Sara. Mine was a knife that had JOHN written on it that I’m currently using to carve this essay.
But the last breakdown takes the cake. It started when we were jarred awake by the now familiar death rattle. The muffled fury of the driver barely audible through two doors, but audible enough. Our tour manager, CB, charged forward to draw up a battle plan. iPhones popped to life behind bunk curtains as we all saw where our Google map pin was. We were heading to San Diego, which by all accounts was eight hours away. It looked to me like we were eight hours from anything but cooked dirt.
When I emerged into the front lounge, Sara was making mimosas with a furrowed brow. “We’re all gonna die out here,” she said. Okay, she didn’t really say that, but what she did say was almost as shocking. “We’re looking into chartering a plane.”
“That sounds cheap,” I said back. The furrow didn’t budge.
We took our mimosas outside and, from the side of I-5 in central California, all eight of us began throwing dirt clods at this piece-of-shit bus. We were snapping pictures and posting. I tried to get #fuckthisbus to trend, but it didn’t really catch on. News came in that we had indeed chartered a plane to San Diego from the nearest airstrip (which was a sad piece of asphalt IN THE MIDDLE OF NOWHERE). We waited for our ride for a long time as the air in the dead bus became increasingly like the air in the 105-degree desert, and the mimosas were wearing off. Finally it came, and it was one of those party limos that you would go to prom in if your prom was in suburban Minneapolis. We filed out and straight onto a tiny plane and met the pilot, who looked pilotey enough, and, surrounded by suitcases in the tiny cabin, we flew very quietly to San Diego.
I’ve never given birth, but I have a few tattoos, and I’ve heard that they’re similar: your brain tricks you into not remembering how traumatic the experience can feel so it lives in your mind as something you might want to do again. Maybe I’m tricked, but I remember a lot of smiling.
* * *
I remember a lot of smiling too. From my OG family to my Little Black Dress tour peeps, it’s been a wild ride of laughing and loving, and I am a better human because they were there.
The
best part of being on tour by far is getting to know my fans. They have held me up (crowd-surfing and otherwise) over the years, and their belief in what I do makes me believe in it too. They make me scrapbooks of letters and pictures and wait for hours to only maybe get to say hello. They want to share their music or share their story, and I wish I had all the time in the world to make each and every one of them feel seen. They want to tell me that I make a difference. Sometimes I don’t know how to process how that feels. It makes me feel very big and very small at the same time. I know that without them, this business is a meaningless machine, and I don’t think they will ever know how much they’ve given me.
Chris Morrissey (left), Misty Boyce, Rich Hinman, Claire Indie, myself, Cara Fox, and Steve Goold backstage at Radio City Music Hall, 2013
During my Kaleidoscope Heart tour in 2010, a girl passed a gift bag to me over the heads of a crowd at a small radio event in Minneapolis. I didn’t see where the bag had come from initially, but spotted the girl waving her hand to me as I picked up the bag and exited the stage at the end of the show. When I got back to my dressing room I looked inside. It was a carved wooden kaleidoscope in the shape of a heart, and it was gorgeous. With it was a letter in which this girl shared that she had been struggling with depression for many years. She had recently come to the conclusion that it was time to take her own life. But, by the grace of God, the act itself was interrupted by a song of mine that came on the radio called Hold My Heart. Something in the music connected to her in that moment and stopped her from doing the unthinkable. She changed her mind. She told me her story in a letter instead, and as I read her words, I was moved to tears. The profundity of that kind of sadness, coupled with the power of music, was overwhelming.
I wrote her a letter the next day and encouraged her to get professional help and shared a number for a suicide hotline as well as mental health support resources. I could tell from her letter that she was an extremely gifted writer, and I encouraged her to tell her story in writing. We have stayed in touch over the years, and it was a proud moment to write to her once again, as I finished this essay, and ask her to tell her story in writing again.
* * *
JESSICA VICKER
In the middle of the night on September 27, 2010, Sara’s lyrics to Hold My Heart played through my speakers and saved my life, as that was the day that I had planned would be my last due to the debilitating symptoms of major depressive disorder that had paralyzed me for so long. Two short months later, on November 2, 2010, I was able to tell her my story in the form of a letter I had written.
April 9, 2011, will probably always be my fondest memory of Sara, as that was the first day we were able to meet in person. Thanks to all of the right stars aligning at the right time, the scribbled note I gave to the man at the ticket booth telling Sara I would be in the crowd that night made it into her hands! I have forgotten many of the things that we said to each other that night, but I will never forget the way she made me feel. It’s the same way I always feel whenever I listen to her music—safe, powerful, and of course BRAVE, all feelings that my illness had robbed me of for so long. I made a promise to her that night that has been in the back of my mind, guiding my thoughts and actions every day since. She made me “pinky promise” that no matter what was to come throughout the rest of my recovery, I would continue to “choose to fight the good fight” and would never allow myself to forget my own strength.
Today, I am very proud to say that I have kept that promise. As Sara’s fans, none of us experience her music the same way, but the message that is communicated is overwhelmingly the same: that we are here for a purpose, we’re all stronger than we know, and we’re all meant to leave a legacy. I hope one day the legacy I leave will be similar to Sara’s, that I will be able to have touched and maybe even saved some lives through my work as a mental health practitioner, where I am able to share my recovery story with others.
* * *
Jessica was a gift to me. All my fans are. The part of me that comes to life in front of them is my most powerful, confident, whole, courageous self. My fans see things in me that I am not always able to see. They are always reminding me, in gorgeous little ways, that connection is the most important part of all of this. Yet again, a soulful lesson from the road.
On the final night of my tour for The Blessed Unrest, we played the Greek Theater in Berkeley, California. Visually it’s an impressive venue, set back beneath tall evergreens, with high raked seats made of what looks like marble. It makes you feel like you’re playing on the stage at the Colosseum in Rome, with more trees and fewer gladiators. The final song of the night was a song called Satellite Call. I wrote it inspired by stories like Jessica’s, for my fans who have shared with me over the years their fears of being lost in the world. I closed my eyes while I sang most of the song that night. . . .
This one’s for the lonely child
the brokenhearted
the running wild
This was written for the one to blame
The one who believe they are the cause of chaos in everything
You may find yourself in the dead of night
Lost somewhere out there in that great big beautiful sky
You are all just perfect little satellites
Spinning round and round this broken earthly life
This is so you’ll know the sound
Of someone who loves you from the ground
Tonight you’re not alone at all
This is me sending out my satellite call
It took my breath away when I opened my eyes to see the entire audience had held up the flashlights on their phones, creating a blanket of thousands of tiny, twinkling, swirling lights, surrounding us. I have seen lots of videos of this happening for other artists onstage, but I can count on one hand the number of times I have experienced it myself. It might seem silly, but it felt like a symbolic exchange. Of being heard and seen. Each little light represented somebody out there who was listening, and collectively, they created a sea of stars. A sea of souls, rather, and I was honored to be among them. It was an enchanted send-off for the evening and for the whole tour, a memory that will make me excited to pack my bags the next time and discover what other magic is waiting out there on the road.
BRAVE
* * *
BRAVE CAME INTO MY LIFE because of Jack Antonoff, and I met Jack because of Tegan and Sara, and I met Tegan and Sara because of Lilith Fair, which is how I met the Indigo Girls, which is like seeing unicorns up close.
I have been a huge fan of Tegan and Sara for a long time. They are talented, passionate, articulate, outspoken women in music. They’ve built a massively successful music career and a devoted fan base on super-smart indie rock/pop songs and a unique sound that doesn’t resemble that of anyone else in our current musical landscape. (They do, however, resemble each other. Twin joke . . . get it? Never mind.) I was so excited to get to play a show with them in Boston at the 2010 Lilith Fair. My friendship with Sara began backstage after the show, where we learned we could make each other laugh, and sometimes that’s all you need to know about a person to know that being friends is a good idea.
The girls were spending some time in LA recording in 2012, and I accepted an invitation from Sara to come by and say hello to them in the studio. It was a warm day, and I walked into Dangerbird studios feeling utterly out of place because that’s what Silver Lake, home of the bohemian hipster, does to me. Every store on the block has artisanal “olde” things that I don’t know how to use, sold by a beautiful man in suspenders and a mustache that I don’t know how to talk to. I was immediately welcomed by the twins and, in their charming, self-effacing way, they reminded me that they never feel cool either, which, now that I think of it, is one of the reasons we became friends in the first place. When really cool people don’t know they’re cool, it makes them especially appealing.
I heard some of their new music, which was amazing and thoughtful and dreamy and melodic and danceable. I was in
the thick of trying to write songs for my own record and making decisions on the direction of the production, feeling overwhelmed. Sara told me about how much fun she’d had in her writing sessions with one of her best friends, Jack Antonoff, whom I had never heard of, but I thought his name sounded regal. Sara suggested I meet him and, if nothing else, she was confident that we would like each other and have good conversation. I would learn later that Jack is good conversation’s best friend. She put us in touch via e-mail, and a month or so later, I met him for breakfast in Santa Monica.
I walked up Montana Avenue toward Blue Plate café, one of my favorite little sunny breakfast spots close to an old apartment of mine. Jack lives in New York and was just getting out of a taxi when I walked up, which is completely normal in New York but the equivalent of arriving on horseback in Los Angeles. He spilled out of the backseat of the cab with arms full of bags and a backpack and a white tuxedo in a see-through garment bag, and I immediately loved him. I asked him why he’d brought everything he owned to our breakfast meeting and he laughed and explained he was eventually heading back to the airport to go home that day. The tuxedo was from his performance with his band, FUN., at the MTV Music Video Awards the previous night. I didn’t know at the time, but Jack is so humble he would never have offered up that information unless I’d asked.
Sounds Like Me Page 8
