Travel Journal Entry 5
Friday March 18, 2022
Where to start? I released my newest single at midnight and I awoke needing to do all of the social media and website stuff to make aware that it is available. That took about an hour and it was immediately time to pack up the last bit of stuff not already loaded in the truck from the night before. It was raining pretty steadily and I am glad I was smart enough to load up all of the gear the night before.
Music release days are always an emotional rollercoaster. As I began the drive down to Tuscaloosa to meet the band and ride in Jeff’s rig to Auburn for the first of two gigs, I began winding down the hours of driving with the usual self-doubt-athon that is release day.
I have released ten songs over the past eighteen weeks. You’d think I would be used to the routine by now but, no. Every release is like the first time.
That number seems unreal. Ten songs in eighteen weeks. Two of the songs were previously recorded and just needed vocals and mixing but the other eight have been built from scratch. That seems darn near impossible but that is what I have done and continue to do. Two of the songs weren’t even written those eighteen weeks ago. The rest have been written for years, decades even.
Part of my self-doubt-athon is that very thing, I am doing this entirely by myself. How will I know if what I am putting out is any good? I know I like the song but it is my song. Have I successfully removed my bias enough to be honest about the song, the recording, the sounds, the musical and recoding engineering choices that I made?
I do have Greg Deluca playing drums on some select songs and so far two songs have been cowritten with Brandon White on a song and Greg Fells on another. Otherwise, anything you hear on these releases is done by me, in a home studio, sitting alone in a little room full of various instruments and a computer.
I am the writer/creator of all of these songs. I write the chord progressions, the melodies, the harmonies, and the lyrics. I arrange them. I record them as I perform them. I mix and produce them. I master them. All of the guitar, bass, drum programming, sampling, keyboards, lead vocals, harmony vocals, banjo, resonator guitar, lapsteel guitar, acoustic guitar...all me.
I am learning as I go about mixing and mastering. I do believe those aspects are improving with each song. But are they? How do I know if they are without a test group to discern if my bias is switching along with the newly learned information or are the mixes objectively getting better? Should I have kept to a very specific style with the exact same instruments and set ups so I could A/B the songs to have a constant point of reference?
You know what? I am boring myself. Self-doubt gets old even to the doubter. Let’s move forward.
I sat in an Arby’s drive through in Tuscaloosa for ten minutes waiting for, and you are never guess what they had me waiting on, a damn Roast Beef Sandwich. Not a Meal. Not even a sandwich and a drink. Just meat(?) on some bread. Ten minutes for microwaved already sliced meat on some hamburger bun. They took ten minutes and still got it wrong. Imagine that!
6:30PM CST
Rode from Tuscaloosa to Auburn Jeff’s truck. Set up, stood on my sneakers to keep my socks dry and I changed into my suit in the misty evening air. A dressing room you say? Ha! Why would anyone want that when you can change in the wet grass by a truck in the wide open were everyone can see. Plus, how are we supposed to get pneumonia in a dry, warm room?
March 19, 2022 (but just barely)
12:47AM CST
Show went well. Pretty sure none of us will be able to talk or sing tomorrow after six straight hours of being outside in the cool, wet night air.
Sitting in the hotel now. I am not going to eat but I am stupid hungry right now. I’m going to bed. It is almost 1AM. Talk to you in the morning. We have to be on the road at 8am to drive to New Orleans for a wedding gig.
Night.
March 19, 2022.
10:43 Am CST
We have been on the road now for almost three hours. I’m on my second large coffee. The first from a Starbucks in Auburn, AL. The second from a Shell gas station in rural southeastern AL. I’m typing on my portable keyboard/iPad combo in the back cab of a Ford F450 pulling a trailer full of gear down the highway. Pretty bouncy back here but I rarely get the distraction of writing while traveling so I am going to take advantage as long as the ride is smooth.
This weekend has been a rough one on my psyche. Like all artsy folk, and most people for that matter, I struggle with depression regularly. I try with all of my might not to let it seep out and onto others. This has not always been the case. I have been a Debbie Downer more than a few times in my past.
Now I tend to keep the darkness, as I refer to my depression, to myself. It is mine and I hate sharing. I’m stingy with my depression. Get your own darkness and get off of my lawn!!
I don’t know if this happens with others that struggle with depression but I have a hard time separating the darker thoughts from the silly and happy thoughts because they so often occur simultaneously with each other. One seems to drive the other. This does come in handy in uncomfortable, emotional situations given that I stay in the mindset of emotional ambiguity and numbness almost always, so there isn’t that awkward shock of uncontrollable emotions to bog me down.
See, here is the thing I have found works for me. I just look for something positive to focus on and move forward. No matter how far spread the darkness gets I look for something to focus my naive optimism on and let the storm, as it were, run its course. Look for that silver lining in those dark clouds.
Easy-peasy, right? Is it just that simple? Not exactly. It does work occasionally but it would work so much better if my brain and my emotions weren’t a tropical island in the wet season.
But, hey, at least it is a tropical island and while I do get tired of always getting drenched from a sudden downpour right about the time my clothes dry from the last time it poured down on my happiness I, at least, do get to exist on a tropical island; and when the sun or the stars come out you just can’t beat that view. Am I right?! Welcome, to Fantasy Island! It just not your fantasy and it still goes horribly wrong just like in the TV show from the 1970’s.
Once again, I bore myself with this whining.
The truck keeps bouncing and I am missing key strokes and I am unwillingly making up some pretty funny letter/number combinations as I try to type. I find this annoying distraction very amusing in the moment.I am looking forward to getting a Cafe Au Lait while in New Orleans. I need some chicory in my life. I won’t sleep at all tonight with all of this coffee and soon to be even more coffee but my tastebuds will be happy.
I am wearing “readers” now and when I look up to see where we are currently at in our journey, I can’t see shit. Looks like I’m trying to spy through the window of an Old West saloon. Anything not immediately in my line of sight is very blurred out.
Kinda funny when I forget that I have them on, look up, and my brain immediately goes into panic, self-diagnosis mood and I have to remind myself I have on glasses and I am not having a stroke. I find that funny. If you can’t laugh at yourself how can you laugh at others? I can do both.
We just hit the Dolly Parton bridge. No more smooth road for a while. I’ll be back later.
March 20, 2022
12:31AM CST
List of things to write about the wedding gig here in New Orleans:
Pain in the ass load in.
2 hours of down time, No green room, No wear to store valuables.
New Orleans is not where you want to be stuck with no where to sit and no where to safely store belongings.
Forgot we needed vaccination cards to go inside anywhere. Card in my bag in my truck in Tuscaloosa
Band contracts and venue workers that are total assholes for no reason.
Show was good. Nice wedding and reception.
Getting hit in the mouth by my mic 6 times.
Photographers: Once you let them take a pic from the stage area they think they can hang out there all night. Literally standing in the way, blocking access to the mic. Hopefully the photographer gets hit in the mouth by the mic too so I am not the only one.
Great cafe au lait and really good bread pudding.
I practiced moderation.
Pain in the ass load out.
On a brighter note:
There was a full moon over Big Muddy tonight. I have never seen the Mississippi River that it hasn’t sparked interest in me about the things it was witnessed over its years. The shear size of this moving body of water is so impressive that it always elicits the same thought from me which I blurt aloud almost instinctively and with zero regard for surrounding company. I even say it aloud when no one is around. That thought is, “damn, that’s a huge ass river!”
Tonight, under the full moon sky, I am taken in by the river’s romantic charm once again. Despite the absolute shit show that was tonight’s beginning and dismissal from our gig I can’t help but fall victim to the beauty of her and to the imagination ignited by the possibilities of this imagery. I took a pic that I intend to share but there is no way that it can capture how this feels in real life.
I certainly can understand what drew humans to the New Orleans area to begin with and what keeps them coming for millenniums. Nights like tonight with the cool early spring wind whisking me away and escorting my imaginative dream around the Quarter makes me completely, and temporarily, forget that I ache and my mood is dark and brooding.
As I breathe deeply I forget that I quit playing music as a career about eight or nine times in the last set alone; and now I want to sit here watching the moon rise and dream up songs to sing in the glory of this unique place on this planet.
I can see and hear the melodies of the music birthed here. I can taste and smell the air of the native cuisine while I imagine the good times past, present, and future that occur here. I can breathe in the debauchery that drove this one-of-a-kind city to fame. No wait, That’s not debauchery as much as it is sulfur, vomit, cat and human piss, someone’s feet, absence of soap and soft water showers… I really wish the wind would start blowing again. Ah, there it is. Now, Where was I? Yes, I could stare at the moon and the river and get lost for hours.
Alas, back in reality, I am standing in my sweaty underwear and t-shirt on a third floor narrow little balcony surrounded by empty road cases that take up almost all of the room on the walkway while a family in a mini van below in the parking lot stare up at me changing out of my suit and back into street clothes. All of this is happening while I am continuously in the way of the rest of the band trying to load cases back into the room where we played.
March 20, 2022
9:15AM CST
“I bet y’all had fun, didn’t you?” Is always the question you get when you say you played a wedding in a place like downtown New Orleans. If I can reflect on that moment in my mind of floating along the mighty Mississippi like Huck and John floating away to freedom, well, then I can honestly answer “yes”.
Ya know, I’m just going to leave that list above alone to speak for itself. Let your imagination take you through the journey of that day filled with a six hour ride, loading in and out of the French Quarter on a Saturday lunch hour and Saturday evening with no loading area to pull into.
I will let you pretend you have two and a half hours of downtime with nowhere to sit except public benches (just not the one’s beside the venue because the wedding photographer needs those to look empty while photographing the wedding party in the middle of a Saturday in the heart of the French Quarter) around the city.
Don’t forgot you weren’t told and didn’t research at all about city laws in a city which you do not live and because you were told you would have a room to change within the venue itself that you didn’t bring your vaccination card with you so you can not go in anywhere to get food, a drink, and just sit and enjoy the city.
I will let you ponder what it feels like setting up a show that routinely takes over an hour with all of the space in the world to last minute instructively being limited to under thirty minutes with almost no space with which to work around each other.
Also, picture the only open space left in the room not filled with dancing bodies while you perform is the space for the band and then people and the wedding photographers using that space as if it were a crosswalk to drunkenly stagger past kicking your mic stand base driving the mic into your lips and teeth.
Go ahead and contemplate the restraint you would show while one of the event venue’s employees talks to you like you are a beggar asking for bread crumbs even though you are contracted to be fed by them and you have the audacity to just stand there awaiting your food because he told you the food as ready but ignorantly figured only three of the nine band member crew wanted to eat. In all honesty, I should’ve just punched that dude square in the mouth.
Yet again. I tire of the whining that I seem to relish typing out for you. The writer in me loves telling the reality of the events in the course of the weekend. That guy loves shattering the illusion that music is a “cush” job with hardly any work. But, the part of me that reads back what I wrote to keep up with what is being said, he just yells inside my brain, “Dude, shut up! No one wants to hear your bitching.”
I am typing again from the backseat of the F450. I am almost back to my truck. I will finish up when I get back home in 200 plus miles. See ya then.
10:32PM EST
I am back home. I have been home for a few hours. My March Madness bracket is no completely busted. I’m just now sitting down to upload everything to my desktop computer.
The past sixty hours have felt like an entire week. I traveled just under one thousand miles. I slept all of seven hours combined in two different beds. I went through two different bouts of darkness. I quit music about thirty times while playing music. I dreamed of spending my life performing and writing music and formed a few new band projects in my mind.
I traveled through five states. I drank around ten cups of coffee. I showered twice. I changed clothes outside in the public eye four times. I lost my phone, my wallet, and my keys three different times. I found them exactly where I put them “so I wouldn’t lose them” all three times.
I laughed aloud more times than I can count. I got to see various places of beauty that not very many people get to see in a single lifetime. I heard many different accents and dialects. I even got to make a few people smile with a quick joke who may have not had a reason to smile. That, that is the part I like most. Yeah, that is the best part. A genuine smile can change the world.
I hope that you have a wonderfully fabulous week and that you find happiness, even if in small bits, everyday.
Good evening.