It seems a tour arises just when it is time for me to leave the city. I can't explain it. Either its some fantastic kind of luck, or perhaps I am just always ready to leave. The routine of things back home found me in a rut, and I couldn't be happier to be hours from the state line.
Every trip I try to figure out what it is about traveling that is so soothing to me. The root of its magic is untouchable, but I think somewhere near that is this overwhelming sense of possibility. A thick stretch of trees line the interstate as far as I can see, all the way to the edge, to where the world seems flat. The endless stretch of highway, monotonous as it is, rattles opportunity to me over and over. It's as though I could drive for hours and hours and stop anywhere and become anyone.
Tonight we will stop in New Orleans, but I will just be myself, I think. Aisha Burns, opening for Idyl. ! This will be the first show of my first solo tour and everyone's asking, but I don't know how I feel. I'm excited of course and nervous sometimes but mostly curious about it all. It is a different animal, taking the stage alone and singing the same personal stories over and over again. They are all fragments of very specific things--past loves, losses, disillusions, lies I tell to myself. It will be quite the experiment to learn what the songs will work up in me after the tenth straight time of their telling. But with all luck and thankfulness, I am not afraid. There are few times that I am struck with purpose (and I'm not fully sure this is really one of them), but I can peacefully say that there's nothing else I'd rather be doing right now.
The road to New Orleans is swampy, rainy and wet. We are running on Alex's homemade banana bread and apples and Saltine crackers. There is a flash flood watch hovering over us. It is cold and pouring rain, and who knows what we'll find once we get there, but we'll go anyway.
The Circle Bar. 9p. tonight!
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