Radical Face - Ghost (Anniversary Edition) (2019)

So I’ve gone and booked some tours. Well, not technically true. Some agents booked a tour for me. But either way, I am touring.

You may have noticed that I don’t tour often. If I am honest, it is not my favorite part of being a musician. I think people assume I’m shy (I’m not) or have stage fright (I don’t), but it really has nothing to do with the shows themselves. Playing songs for people is often really fun. It’s just everything that surrounds touring — the lifestyle of it — I am not very built for.

On the physical side, I’ve been plagued by back problems since I was 19 and tried to film a “sponsor me” video for skateboarding. I fell from a 4 foot ledge onto my tailbone and haven’t been the same since. Which is why I have to play seated at shows. I don’t prefer playing that way at all, but I do it as a safety, so if my back is all jacked up from sitting in a van for 8 hours a day I can still perform. I also have insomnia problems on a good day, so put me on the road in a different bed every night and I can have sleep problems pretty quick.

And then there’s my little ol’ voice. I recently went to a voice doctor in Los Angeles and they put a camera down my nasal cavity and into my throat, and I finally learned why I lose my voice so easily. I have a type of paralysis in one of my vocal chords. I only have about 15% mobility on the left side. This is not new. I have likely had this since I was pretty young and wasn’t taken to a doctor for a throat infection and permanent damage was done. As such, I have always been a quiet speaker and have really low projection. Of all the things I do musically, singing is the one I have fought for the most. I had very little natural ability for it, and it is what I have to practice the most. But what I learned from this vocal doctor is that I use a lot of neck muscles to speak and sing, much more than most people, so when I talk too much, push too hard or don’t get enough rest/sleep, I lose my voice because my neck tires out. Weird! But I was really happy to learn all of this. It helps me plan for this next bit of touring in a way I’ve never been able to before, because I didn’t know what was happening.

And lastly, I think I’ve always struggled with the monotony of touring. I’m happiest doing creative work, and touring is all about repetition. It might appear like touring is the more exciting part of music, but when I am home and working on projects, every day is different. I never quite know what I’m going to be doing, and I really love that. On tour, almost every day is the same. You actually have to work really hard to repeat yourself! Hahaha.

So this time around, I’m doing it all different. The dates have all been broken into smaller chunks — each 2 -3 weeks with breaks — so that I can put creative work in between each outing. We spent time working on the routing so getting 7 hours of sleep a night is actually feasible. And we scheduled more days off in between so I can have bursts of quiet time and not lose my voice. I think it’s going to make a big difference. And I’ve also come to realize that a lot of this is in my outlook. I’m looking at these tours as a way to gather stories, write a lot in my notebooks, read all the books I have not been able to find time for lately, and finally play some Switch games.

And I am also reconnecting with why we do this. Go to shows, I mean. I sometimes forget the communal aspect of music. It has mostly been a private affair for me. So much of my relationship with music has been in headphones — listening to mixtapes on a bus as a teenager going to the library, or sitting on the shore in the evenings and listening to albums. And then I make records alone for the most part. So it’s most often just been a place to figure out what the hell is going on with me emotionally. Some kind of internal mirror that I learned about myself with. But music can also be a shared experience, and unite people instead of just comfort them. I never went to that many shows growing up, so I forget this. But I’ve been asking friends and colleagues what they see in shows, and their answers have been a really nice reminder. It’s giving touring a greater sense of purpose beyond “I guess I’m supposed to.”

Wow. That was much more than I thought I had to say! Well, here are the actual dates, for those who are interested in coming out.