Tour Diary 8.19 (Patreon)

I'm not entirely sure I have the motivation or clarity of mind necessary to write even this entry, let alone consistent Tour Diary entries as I go through the ICIMI tour, but I figured I'd post a little something today and try to post at least a couple paragraphs here and there.

On this tour, the team and I are riding in a Bandwagon RV/camper with a sixteen foot trailer hitched to the back. It is utterly enormous beyond all reason, and even considering the fact that its fridge allows for groceries instead of more expensive meals on the go and its 8 beds allows for us to forego the cost of hotels, it is still ridiculously expensive and ostentatious. (And with how horribly it shakes sleeping on it is almost impossible) It's comfortable enough though, a massive improvement over a sprinter van, and ultimately I went for it because I wanted to keep my team comfortable. It's a treat, and it's fun. But it's a little embarrassing to pull up for a show with 200 tickets sold in such a grandiose vehicle. Not that all of the shows are that small, but not all of the shows are larger.

The RV not as full as it would be too, because we ran into some staffing issues last minute. At the moment it's me, Shaw the merch guy, Gabe the videographer, Matt the tour manager/booking agent, and Nick the driver in the cab up front. All super cool guys. We lost Dave, former VIP manager and would-be secondary merch guy last minute, and Filipe the new VIP guy caught COVID a few days before tour started so he's going to be meeting us in Chicago tonight. So the first few days the team has been scrambling to make up for absences.

This has been especially difficult due to what happened night one, just a few hours into our trip up to Niagara Falls. We were all in our little bed pods on what I've playfully called The Starship 69 (the hitch trailer has a big 69 on it) which are stacked up in the back of the RV like coffins in a mausoleum, and I noticed the ride was getting pretty bumpy. It had been bumpy all along, but I figured we were hitting some rough terrain. But then it started to get worse - much worse, and I became rather concerned. Everyone was fast asleep but me, as far as I could tell, and I wasn't about to start waking people up over a little anxiety moment, but then the smell hit. The bumps became more violent, the noises got louder, and the air began to fill with the stench of burning rubber. I didn't want to wake anyone up just to be a scaredy cat and have us pull over on the side of the road so we could just find out that the only thing wrong with the bus is that one of its passengers is a bitch.

But my self-perception, or system of doing so, has changed quite a bit recently. I'm proud to say that I decided to ignore my self-consciousness and wake Matt up so he could walkie Nick and have him pull over. I figured, I guess, that the worst thing that happens if everything's fine and I'm being dramatic is my team thinks I'm a bit of a baby. And while up until rather recently that might have stopped me, I've gotten to a point where I'm no longer quite so concerned with what people think of me. It's quite freeing, and in this case lead to avoiding a truck accident on the highway, because we pulled over to discover we were seconds away from a totally blown tire on basically totally collapsed shocks.

We pulled into a truck stop and crashed there for the night, waiting for Bandwagon to send a repair guy over. When he arrived, we found out there was no repairing the Starship 69, that the company would have to send a whole new RV over. After much debate and planning, we decided that Matt and Shaw would take a box truck UHaul full of merch and equipment to Niagara Falls, and Gabe and I would bribe an Uber driver to take us there. Nick would stay behind with the wreck of the 69, and when Bandwagon brought him the new RV he would meet us in Niagara. We got to the venue a bit late, but it ended up working out in the end, thanks to the hard work of my team and help from Shayfer James and the folks at the Rapids Theater.  The venue was beautiful, although we were quite shocked to discover that Niagara Falls NY is not a booming tourist trap but an apocalyptic wasteland that made Detroit look like Beverly Hills. I felt out of sorts and overwhelmed at the show, but felt a sense of freedom on stage that my anxiety used to rob from me.

The new Bandwagon was delayed in its delivery, so the endlessly kind Endless Mike, who works in Adult Protective Services in Pittsburgh and plays punk-y folk music, offered to bring me and my equipment to Columbus in the event that Nick couldn't get the new ship out in a timely enough fashion for me to get to sound check in time the next day. He brought me to a local hotel and we talked about anarchism, cancel culture, DIY scenes and ethos, and all the other things I have increasingly complicated feelings about. 

The next day he drove me the full five hours to Columbus, and we chatted the whole way. Thankfully Mike is a talkative guy, which helps compensate for my conversational deficiencies that result in my characteristic anxiety-induced quietness and mush mouth. But he's not talkative in a blabber-mouthed way, but in an open sort of way, where you can tell his willingness and energy to talk more than I naturally do comes from a courage to share and love for human connection. It sounds like some pretty big stuff to say about someone I hardly know, but Mike Miller's the kind of guy where there's a profundity in his essence that's hard not to notice. 

Towards the end of the ride, we started talking about connecting with artists. I explained how I feel I need a "key" to unlock a connection with an artist - a back story, a character, a relatable quirk - and that I just didn't get Sufjan Stevens despite liking the sounds at least in concept. He offered up Neutral Milk Hotel's story, and I confessed that I, a musician, had managed to make it the age of 29 without having heard Aeroplane Over the Sea. Mike was so excited to share it with me, that he asked me to put it on, saying it was one of his favorites if not his favorite record of all time and that he recommends it to everyone he meets and any time there's a secret Santa at his workplace or anything he always gives them a copy. I didn't expect to like it that much. I feel like such a basic white boy saying this, but Neutral Milk Hotel's Aeroplane over the Sea was the most lyrically powerful album I've listened to. I think a lot of the time the lyrics are what it's all about for me, and the simultaneously hideous and beautiful lyrics on that album are still gripping me right now.

I walked onstage last night with no nerves. None of the shakes or stiffness I tend to start off with. No unnecessary "um" after a punchline to buffer myself from the anticipation of laughter or silence. No "lean into it" nervousness or character work necessary. I stepped onstage, cracked some jokes, gave the audience a chance to take a video of me explaining that I was the one who started the whole "calling Will Wood's music spooky is antisemitic" thing, and had done so as a joke to prove how easy it was to make up fake "woke" stuff. The audience loved it, and then put their phones away so they could have the fun memento they wanted without me losing touch with them. I went on to play one of my favorite performances of my career. Maybe my best yet. It was such a thrill and I am so grateful for that.

Thank you so much Columbus, you guys were a phenomenal audience, were so much fun to perform for, and showed me just how much fun this really can be when I'm freed from all of the anxiety and resentment that I've carried with me up until very recently. And of course thank you to Endless Mike, Matt Pless, Shayfer James, my team, and the folks at Ace of Cups who made last night possible. How strange it is to be anything at all!

See you tonight, Chicago. I'm pulling up in the Starship 69 (we kept the 69 trailer, so this is the Starship Theseus-69) literally right this second.

Much love,

-ww