Strange Days

Tour Diary 8-20-22

We’re waking up from a really strange ten days out here on the road. Or maybe it’d be more appropriate to say that I am waking up from said ‘strange days’. Strange not because the poles shifted or one of the dogs that I cohabitate with started speaking in tongues, but more earthily off kilter. I threw out my lower back last week on the morning of a show day leading into a three show run and everything in my world just came to a screeching halt the second that pain rifled through me. I thought for a moment that I might be dreaming because the pain was so immediate and intense. Violent enough that my knees went wobbly for a moment before I attempted walk it off. I quickly discovered there’d be no walking this off and that I’d properly fucked up, so I shuffled to my hotel bed and collapsed. Fast forward a few days and we had to postpone four shows. (Shakes head in remorse and sighs…) I have been physically humbled in a way that hasn’t happened since I lost my fight with the giant shard of terra cotta that land-sharked my achilles tendon almost 20 years ago.

It’s such a specific feeling, emotionally and psychologically, to have the Universe tell you to sit down. Where there is no arguing with it, no debate, no robust negotiation, but instead a swift and decisive swinging of the gavel and all our best laid plans laid to waste. Time to surrender, hold there for a moment, then slowly reassess and eventually adapt. It seems to me that if I were looking for some semblance of meaning or sense about what transpires in these instances, it would be a golden opportunity to listen very carefully to what was being said. I suppose at this point in our exchange here most of you have gotten the not inaccurate idea that I tend to have a ‘bent’ (for want of a better term) in this direction. On my worst day I could be accused of being intoxicated by magical thinking. But on a good day, and hopefully most of the time, I like to clue into potential subtext, kernels of information that might be so close to me that they’d be easy to miss or blow right past. So! Here, in my week of forced repose, it is now becoming obvious to me that:

A) I need to honor signals in my body more.

B) Touring is fucking brutal on my earth suit.

C) Touring beyond a few weeks at a time is a younger person's gig. (But now that I’m thinking about it, it’s always verged on “continual ordeal”.)

D) Kettle Bells are the stupid.

E) Acupuncture is miraculous.

F) Making music with many thousands of people a night is such an uplifting and fulfilling experience, I think it’s worth the aforementioned “continual ordeal”.

7) Maybe being forced to sit down every once in a while is less of an ordeal and more of an opportunity to see from a novel perspective. A human experience is so deeply contingent upon one’s vantage point and we can easily lose sight of the fact that there are an infinite number of ways to perceive and therefore experience. So maybe having to sit down every once in a while is an invitation to observe from a point of view unavailable to us under what might be described as more normative circumstances.

If any of you reading this had tickets to any of the shows that were postponed, I offer you my deepest apologies and we’ll keep you posted on the what’s, where’s and when's. Canceling and or postponing shows is not unusual in this weirdorama epoch we all are laboring through, but that doesn’t make them fair or fun. So I am regretful that my hobble down ‘doctor-says-I-need-a-backiotomy’ lane came with such a cost. The good news is that I am back on stage with my dudes! We played Dallas and Houston and tonight we play Austin. I am sitting for most of the set and it’ll have to do, but I am swiftly making my way back (haHA!) to the land of the boogie down and no longer in much pain. I should be good as new in a matter of days. My new dilemma is figuring out how to NEVER go through this again. That and fielding the onslaught of unsolicited though deeply appreciated advice about what to do for a hurt back.

See you guys tonight in Austin. With love and gratitude,

-Brandon