For this series of articles, our writer Ty Maxwell will be documenting his tour of the Northeast, spanning from August 6th to September 8th. Maxwell will be writing reflections and insights into the process of booking and executing a DIY tour as an independent artist, the relationships that enable the whole enterprise, and the general day-to-day experience: the minutiae, difficulties and triumphs involved in touring as a solo musician.
Day Thirteen: Monday, August 18th, 2025 – Buoy Gallery (Kittery, ME) with Hello Shark, Convinced Friend
I’ve been to Kittery once before, last year when I was on tour with rock group Another Michael. We played in Portland and drove south to Kittery to spend the night with our friend Linc, a former Philadelphian, who performs as Hello Shark. I lived in southern Maine – Gorham and Portland – back in 2006-2008, so I’ve long been familiar with Maine’s combustible summertime energy; it's that merging of local gratitude for warm weather met with an influx of tourists and travelers looking to get in on it alongside the resulting “boom!” of industry that caters to them. The Buoy Gallery, where I played this time around, is situated right next to the decadent Black Birch gastropub, across the street from the Corner Pub, around the corner from the record store and the cafe that makes insanely good crullers. I’d heard only great things about the visual art and music they’ve curated in the past and was thrilled they’d deigned to let me book something in their space. (Shout out to Alex Mead, who opened the gallery in 2009 and also works behind the bar at Black Birch, a man with impeccable taste; thanks for hipping me to Michael Franks’ Sleeping Gypsy, dude!)
Linc, Austin (who performs as Convinced Friend, from Providence) and I arrived early to set up the chairs and PA. The concrete floors were basking in an orange glow cast by a mixed-media mural by the late artist Baxter Koziol, whose work is currently on display throughout the gallery. We were gradually met by a small crowd that filled most of the seats in our corner of the space; breaking from the bulk of these shows, the audience skewed much older than us. It was one person’s 62nd birthday and he’d brought a bunch of friends along. Stuff like this is random and surprising in the best possible way. The entire group was enthusiastic, engaged, and charming, and I got to talk to everyone individually and thank them personally for coming. All this, after Linc openly fretted and worried, while we were setting up, about whether or not anyone would come.
I’m firmly middle-aged, turning forty next year. I've often been the oldest person in the room on this tour; it was so refreshing to be surrounded, and witnessed, by elders on this particular night. I found myself leaning into the universal qualities of my music, knowing that my songs might affect an audience decades older than myself differently than they hit younger crowds. You connect differently to people when you know that those people see you differently than you see yourself. Performing music in these instances is kind of like communicating across an immutable gap or distance — of reaching someone across a chasm, whatever it may be, real or perceived. During these moments, the idea that fleeting encounters have a kind of permanence is heightened.
I closed my set with a piece of mine that incorporates the John Ashbery poem “Just Walking Around” (“and now that the end is near/ the segments of the trip swing open like an orange”). Though Ashbery has an enduring reputation for being difficult and opaque, to me, there’s no message more universal, more open-hearted than ending with these words: “if I am still there, grant that we may see each other.”
In the morning, I got a call from my parents — in the purest of coincidences, they were in Maine, north of me, driving south to Rhode Island, on vacation, visiting friends — would I like to grab lunch? “Of course, I’d love nothing more.”
