Tiny tour, etc.

In the last few years, I have felt some weird insecurities come up around the idea of touring as a musician. I watch as my peers play shows all over the country and recount their experiences of sleeping on floors and playing to new people every night. The novelty of a new town and driving with your friends in a cramped van. I have romanticized the idea of tour for my whole life, but have never done it myself.

My stubborn need for self-sufficiency from a young age meant that I prioritized stability with an urgent fervor - always thinking I would “allow myself” to explore my creativity more fully once I met a certain arbitrary goal post of success, whether that was a certain level of income or relationship status or other vague notion of "being an adult.” As a young adult, the way I felt inside my anxious body and brain never felt cohesive with the way I saw other artist friends living their lives - so risky and brave and wild. That scared the shit out of me. I’m sure there is something to be said about the fact that the artist friends I had when I was young were boys in bands - raised with the privilege of not having to think too hard about risk. I think, being raised as a woman, whether intentionally or not, is often to be raised to worry.

Music was important to me always, and songwriting has always been my passion and a requirement for living my life. But the idea of “if I dedicate myself to this passion fully, I’m going to MAKE IT” never really crossed my mind. I’ve always prioritized the practical. I went to college immediately after high school and worked 2-3 jobs at once for my 4 years there. It felt so important to me to be self-sufficient, which ultimately meant my college years are a blur of not learning very much on not enough sleep. I started working the job that would technically become my “career” within a few years of graduating. I am a project manager and I’ve been in some iteration of this role at the company I’m at for the greater part of a decade. I’m not driven by career success, but I am driven by stability. Knowing I can take care of myself and know where my paychecks and healthcare benefits are coming from has always been a priority that kept me from ever even considering pursuing music full time.

Because of that insistence on stability, I’ve created a comfortable balance of life for myself here in Salt Lake City - a consistent schedule of a day job with the evenings and weekends to write and collaborate and connect and perform to my heart’s desire. Which for the last ten years has been plenty. But I’ve noticed my admiration for other musicians doing something different sour into envy on more than one occasion recently, and finding myself feeling stuck and less fulfilled by playing the same sorts of shows to the same group of (lovely and supportive and amazing) people. I’m not sure if it’s the terrifying ordeal of growing older, or the never-ending witnessing of death and loss and grief from every corner of the world (likely a mix of the two plus many other factors), but our human existence on this planet has felt so incredible short and fleeting to me lately. Every moment feels important and scary and too short and endless all at once. It has been so much easier to see why people choose the riskier path and deprioritize stability. We are only here for so long.

So like with anything in my life that starts with a binary - I started thinking about why that binary exists and what is stopping me from seeing it in a third (or seventh or eighth!) way that could fit me better than the two ways that are not currently fitting me. Why has it always been “work your day job and say goodbye to joy but hellooooo stability comfy boring foreverrrr” vs. “LOVE YOUR ART AND SLEEPING ON FLOORS AND STARVING FOR YOUR PASSION” and why was this binary still kicking my ass with envy and grief and worry after LITERALLY LIVING SOMEWHERE IN THE MIDDLE for years??

So it was May of this year and my therapist and I had been talking about how instead of blowing up my life when I get the wiggly feeling* (like I’ve already done a few times) that I could conduct “controlled burns” that are easier on me and my loved ones and still novel and nurturing and fulfilling and exciting but in a way that honors me and the work I have done to get here and the love and stability that I value. And my art was feeling stagnant and stuck and weird because the great creative platonic love of my life had just moved to another country and redefining myself musically felt ImPoSsiBle and navigating the distance felt unsurmountable and when I sat down and thought “What the fuck can I do that feels scary and big and intimidating but will ultimately stretch me in a way that aligns with my values and intentions as a weird little bug of a human being and gets me out of feeling wiggly and fucking BAD ALL THE TIME?!!!??” and when I listened to my envy and my admiration and my adoration and my heart and my feet and my hands and my pillows and the sky - they all said together in a soft little voice:

“why don’t you go on tour?”

_{*Every few months at least and sometimes for years at a time I feel like I’ve suddenly outgrown or am starting to outgrow everything around me from my clothes to my relationships to the paint on the walls and sometimes I am outgrowing things and other times I’m just not addressing something I need to in one area and it’s spilling out into every area and making me ^{w i g g l y.}} 

And at the same time that I heard that question and was looking for an excuse to say it would be too hard and to stay in my comfy and stable little SLC bubble, one of my favorite bands of all time, Menomena, announced that they were going to be playing a reunion show in Portland in August and I immediately bought a ticket and took to yelling about how excited I was on twitter. And my incredible new friends in the band Scarves dm’d me about my tweet and said “hey if you’re coming to Portland for that show why don’t we set up a show or have you come play in Seattle with us around the same time?” and while my brain was searching for a reason to politely decline, my fingers typed “I would love to.”

So I booked three shows in three different cities around the date of the Menomena show within a few hours of that moment with an urgency that told me if I didn’t say yes and plan this all out right this moment on this very day that I would continue to be stuck in this feeling forever. Always, with the dramatics.

I took the skills I have been developing in my day job as a creative project manager and the life-long internet friendships I have been nurturing for years and it all just came together. Smooth and easy and nice and I got to marry my left and right brains and think through my route and every detail and just do it.

Every time a little voice would pop into my head to tell me that I wasn’t doing enough or it didn’t count as a tour because it was barely three shows over a weekend, I thought about how scary this had felt to say yes to. How yes, many bands have been touring since they were teens and they go for months at a time - but people are different and to me, these three shows were just as massive of an accomplishment as a month’s long European circuit would be to one of those bands. This tour was the proof I needed to give myself that prioritizing stability was a perfectly acceptable way to live my life so far. That it’s not ever too late and sometimes, waiting until you have the skill set to be your own exceptional tour manager is actually the best possible plan you could have had and allowed you to do a thing you always wanted to do at exactly the right time.

From August 8th to August 12th, I drove from SLC to Boise, ID to Seattle, WA to Portland, OR and back home to SLC and I had truly the most wonderful time. I got to see so many old friends and new friends. I got to meet Eden, aka Helvetica Blanc, the artist I have been able to partner with on the art for my last album and all of it’s iterations in real life. I got to see family and my ex-husband/forever family Jory and new internet friends and old internet friends. I got to sing my songs with strangers who knew the words. I got to sing my heart out to Neko Case’s This Tornado Loves You while driving down i5. I got to give myself a gift of the knowledge that I have this magical, life-long love of songwriting that even in its familiarity, I can tap into on any given weekend and turn it into something entirely new.

I sat down to write a play-by-play of every moment of the tour, but somehow this whole experience as a conceptual mountain to climb in the expansive range of my life felt like the more important thing to explore today. I feel unstuck, coming home to my comfortable set schedule in SLC. I feel that there is this bottomless well of joy just waiting to be continuously explored for as long as this body will let me.

If you are reading this, I love you and I am so deeply grateful to you for the encouragement of my music and me that allows me to connect with other people in this way. Thank you. I hope to come to your city someday soon on one of my newly established tiny tours. 🥲 

I hope you will also check out the music of all of the incredible bands and artists that I got to play with on my first tour ever:

• Boise’s The Other Room There and Vexed Vixen

• Seattle’s Scarves, Divorce Care, Pseudo Saint

• Portland’s Tradie and Soda Jinx