CITY CENTER: June 2008

Here in London, the last day of tour. The time has been intense for the last several weeks, and I want to write about it, but I'm not sure how to exactly. I woke up today feeling vaguely sad, like some part of me was missing or broken. It took me a minute to remember that that's the end-of-tour feeling, one I should be really well-aqquainted with but always forget until it has me in it's grips. Instead of a lengthy tour journal, I'm gonna do a super truncated summary, hitting up each day with as few words as possible. Haiku-style. Really excited to be back home and have my life change completely, as I have a feeling it will really soon.

Day 1: Airport blues. Stay awake forever, meet the Black Atlantic, collect all band members, play cracked out show in Wetzlar, Germany that's divided into two parts, fast & slow.
Day 2: Betty gets sick as hell, can't play. Me, Steve & Sellwood get wasted and have an awesome trio set at the Pop-Up festival in Lepzig.
Day 3: Emergency room. Yikes. So-so show in Magdeburg but best meal ever. Fried vegetables, lives simultaneously ruined and completed.
Day 4: Copenhagen. Someone shouts out for a Silver Jews cover and then people rush the stage to sing back up when I start playing one. Rad.
Day 5: Aalborg. Watch the Daniel Johnston documentary before playing a show to six people in a squat on the Sunday after a city-wide festival and see how it makes you feel.
Day 6: Oslo. Get to see Ingeborg, some new friends. Beautiful city and the sun basically never sets. So idyllic it's kind of hard to leave.
Day 7: Stockholm. Home sweet home.
Day 8: Upsalla. Last time we played this city it was to 600 people in a swinging barroom connected to the University. This show was to five people in a restaurant in the lobby of the train station. A thourally whatever show, but good for matters of perspective.
Day 9: Long drive to Malmo, totally amazing night. Steve's birthday. He vanishes at some point and we see him again at 8 in the morning. The rest of the camp has been out dancing all night to really weird djs who rock the Eagles, Kenny Loggins, the theme from "Cheers" (wtf?) and somehow keep a party going.

Day 10: Soma arrives! Betty leaves, but not before us playing in the smallest room ever, so hot that everyone in the band takes most of their clothes off. This agitates/excites the crowd into imaging our music is good, so we play several dozen encores and sell lots of records. Hamburg now has a special place in our hearts.
Day 11: Two shows in different Dutch cities. Utrecht is nice by night.
Day 12: The laziest Sunday ever. All we do is eat and sleep all day, playing an ambient set at the club in Groningen that almost no one gets and Dutch bloggers will later write about as an unprofessional reaction to the small audience. You can't save everyone.
Day 13: Amsterdam. Amster GOD DAMN@!!! is more like it.
Day 14: Hang out all day, Steve buys "White Widow" brand weed in a coffee shop, seems like it does him ok. We train to Leiden and play in the smallest room any band has ever played in. Ten people makes it seem like it's full, and it should rule, but somehow our set sucks really bad and no one feels good for the next several hours.
Day 15: Doing pull-ups to kill time I pull a muscle in my shoulder that fucks me up for pretty much the rest of tour. White, electric pain in my sleep. So lame.
Day 16: Berlin. An amazing amazing day and night. I've never been to this town before, and it's beyond beautiful, really inspiring. The show is killer, the vibe is good, we all get to see some old friends and then everyone but me gets fucking obliterated wasted and me and Soma get to DJ a little bit, bringing the dance party alive at about three am. The Black Atlantic, inspired by watching "The Big Lebowski" drink white russians all night. Drinking more than two white russians sounds like a really nauseating idea to me, and these guys are up to 12 and 15 each. So sick. Most everyone is throwing up or hung over in a bad way by the next morning. We have the most amazing breakfast, heavy on deserts at the vegan place in Berlin and drive very slowly all day.

Day 17: Würzburg is the most picturesque city ever. So beautiful. We play with super sweet San Fransisco kids Who Calls So Loud and enjoy a really laid-back day.
Day 18: The club we play at in Weisbadden puts us up in a room connected to the venue, but also connected to the teenage dance night that goes until 5 am. In a bunk bed I hear bass so clustered and distorted that it's almost soothing as is runs through layers of concrete. I imagine it's a Fuck Buttons jam, but it's actually Eminem and the sound of German kids doing their thing. Everyone smells and feels perhaps the worst by the morning of this night.
Day 19: Playing to a very small audience as the Football championships are happening this night. A good show, but kind of tired and hitting the wall.
Day 20: An awesome show in Vienna, a place I've never been. We go to the Austrian public radio headquarters and do an interview and three acoustic songs, then we shoot some video outside in an abandoned train station for a video blog called They Shoot Music Don't They, then we play a show that is amazing for a lot of really excitable kids, then we rage yet again all night.
Day 21: In my mind, the best show of tour. We play in a small stone terrace in the garden of an art museum in Esslingen, Germany. One of the most beautiful places I've ever played at in my life. We play a set of half-improvised, half practiced jams, super gentle and really fluid. Through all the weariness and strange feelings of tour, I somehow reach a point where I feel like I imagine the light of a candle must feel. Calm, understood, still.
Day 22: A rad show in Freiburg, followed by a not so rad 9 hour overnight drive. Joanna arrives to surprise the hell out of me, which rules. Black Atlantic can't play cause Geert sadly had to go to a funeral, so the remaining members of both bands form White Chocolate* (*see footnote), a heavy psyche collective and people actually get pretty into it.
Days 23/24: Cracked out as hell from the all night drive, we have to do another one, this time from Geert's solo show in Amsterdam to the Calais ferry to Heathrow airport to drop of Soma. Dark days. We somehow make it, but the days blur at this point. Right now it's Day 25 and I'm sitting in Kentish Town at the apartment of Christian from the Datsuns, who was nice enough to let us crash here while he's gone for the weekend, having never met us before. This connection, the result of a myspace bulletin might be the first instance of myspace actually facilitating something positive. Last night and tonight we're playing with Hefner in London and after tonight's show we're gonna do a set with our Pop Art friends around the way. Then at 8am I'm on a plane and back to the apple. Anybody want to hang out and have a cool summer? I would be up for a cool summer. This post, though brief in my mind is actually pretty long, so thanks for reading. I hope to post nothing but new songs for the next month or so. See you all soon.

*At some point on the tour I bought a Swedish DVD of the Ben Stiller/Jennifer Aniston 2004 comedy "Along Came Polly". It sucked super bad, but in true tour-mode we watched it every day, learning all the lines, and even watching it with director's commentary on, which in everyone's experience was the first time any of us had ever watched an entire movie's worth of commentary. "White Chocolate" is an Along Came Polly reference, as were many other moments of tour.

Chilling out hard on a very lazy Sunday in Holland. We have one day without a show on this whole tour, but we're trying to get something going for that day, too. Yesterday we played an outside festival and then a launch show for a new label called Beep Beep! Back Up The Truck in Utrecht. We're now down to just three band members, me Steve and Sellwood. Thinking pretty heavily about changing up the sound every night. We'll see if it happens or not, but if so, I will try to record the results of the ambient set and the all King Kahn & BBQ covers set. Megan & Geert's house is in the center of a very idilic sort of world and there are strawberries everywhere.