Days Six and Seven: Monday and Tuesday, August 11th-12th, 2025 – ON THE SUBJECT OF “OFF DAYS”: Downtime in western Massachusetts, featuring Dream Choir rehearsal and the sound capabilities of the Plainfield Pond for WET WEIGHTLESS WORLD
When booking your own DIY tour, it’s crucially important, both logistically and spiritually, to account and design schemes for fun, leisure, rest and work on your non-show days. You’re going to want to take days off, if only because it’s harder to get people to go to a show (or accommodate one at their house) on a Monday. Bigger tours, with bottom lines and profit-maximizing incentives, spread out far and wide, to hit as many A-markets as possible, with incredibly long drives, even days totally dedicated to driving; I’ve absolutely had fifteen-hour days in fifteen-passenger vans, shoulder-to-shoulder with bored doom-scrolling bandmates, hoping we can make it to whatever hotel we’ve booked in whatever town before too late, with no time for anything but the drive, the drive, the drive. (In fact, touring folks often speak not of “days off” but “off days,” as they usually involve a degree of commuting.) Too much of that starts to feel unhealthy, and the tour potentially takes on an overwhelmingly liminal quality. When I take my solo trips, I try to go about it in as much the opposite way as I can: keep things small, keep things simple, keep things close.
“It’s hainted – both haunted and tainted,” my friend, the great multidisciplinary artist Kristine Leschper, said yesterday, when we were catching up in her cabin and talking about my trip. She was referring to the words “tour” and “merch” as hainted, something we’ve discussed at length before: the way they might evoke a degree of professionalism and capitalism, the way they frame things. I think of a “tour of duty,” as though it were entirely for profit at the expense of pleasure; I think of being considered less a traveling musician or artist and more a traveling merchant, trying to empty these t-shirt bins, these record boxes, measured by dollars and units moved. (I am out here doing this with no merch to speak of, no physical media whatsoever. Just me and the instruments.)
Sometimes I attempt to opt out of the reflexive use of “tour” when describing what I’m doing, as in many ways it feels like a glorified road trip. One of the advantages of being a small, independently-minded artist is that you are less beholden to the contractures of radius clauses, by which I mean: I can play one town one night and play another town not very far away the next night, because it’s not like I’m a big-ticket draw anywhere anyway. I could play to completely new people every day by sheer force of geography. Every day begins anew, and I don’t have to go far to get far.
So when I was planning the routing, I specifically plotted with Kristine to visit her for a couple days, conveniently at a mid-way point between Boston and Catskill, mostly because I’ve dropped by before and she’s a dear friend and it’s always an exceptional time, especially in the summer. And why shouldn’t going on tour be an excuse, at least partially, to visit faraway friends and go swimming? But another beautiful and desirable benefit is that it gives me a chance to live like I’m not on tour, in a way, which is to say: I’m not just coming here to rest my head and leave, but to have, and add to, an experience. And the closer I can get to an experience that makes me feel like an active participant in the place – not just someone passing through, but more like someone who is temporarily living here, like a resident – the better. Realness, to be blunt with it.
So when Kristine invited me to a rehearsal of the choir she sings in – they’re known as Dream Choir – of course I said yes. When she asked me to help her at the community garden, setting up trestles so her scarlet runner beans have something to climb, scything weeds and spreading woodchips? Yes, duh! I want things to do that make me feel like I’m part of this place, not just a scavenger scooting obliquely from town to town, looking for what I can take, what I can extract. Dream Choir rehearsal was, coincidentally, at the home of someone I’ll be sharing the bill with on Thursday at my show at the Sulis Studio in Northampton; even little things like that – getting to meet a musician you’ll be playing together with, outside of the show context – make the whole pursuit feel more communal, more personal, more connected, at least for me.
Kristine is planning an event on Saturday, August 23rd at the Plainfield Pond in Plainfield, Massachusetts – dubbed WET WEIGHTLESS WORLD (details in the poster at the top of this article.) It will be “an experimental event featuring music, poetry, and art performances on the pond... Some performances will be viewable from the shore, while others will take place on parts of the pond only reachable by boat.” I won’t be there, but I get to feel a little involved, because tonight we will attempt to measure the time and distance from the shore to a small island in the pond, by kayak; and we’ll experiment with some homemade instruments, which use water displacement to push air through pitched reeds, to make sure they’ll behave appropriately for the happening. Not an average way to spend your off days, and so much better for it.
