Back from our first overseas tour since the pandemic began – it was wonderful to reunite with friends, to be in other countries, to play music for new audiences… And there were only two disasters.
One unfortunately seems to be inevitable for touring musicians today: I caught covid. And while I’ve been sick on tour many times – although shaking with fever was a new wrinkle – being sick on tour with a highly contagious disease is a fresh logistical nightmare. I don’t have any insight for how to deal with it. Yet deal with it we must, alas. Talk to any touring musician and you’ll get covid stories. This isn’t going away.
But the other disaster was completely avoidable, and so it seems worth writing about. It involved professionalism, or a lack thereof.
Maybe it’s weird to hear a musician like me invoke professionalism. From the start, our music has been associated with lo-fi, DIY, indie – call it what you want, it’s tinged with a love for the homemade, the self-taught, the …
