The Southward Scramble
From Philadelphia to: Georgia; North Carolina; South Carolina; West Virginia; and beyond
Oct. 10, 2025
In August and September, I organized a near-utopic DIY tour from Philadelphia across New England and the North East, writing around 45 pages about my travels for this site. At no point did I ever really give the real, practical, unsexy context for why I was going on that tour.
I started booking the tour back in April for two main reasons. The first was that I had just lost my housing in Germantown and was struggling to find a new place in Philly, the city I’ve called home for the last decade. The second was that I had just decided to quit a job I’d been performing remotely for five years after they decided to scale back my hours and pay by around 90 percent. What had been a decent way to make a living in Philadelphia was definitely not going to cut it anymore, and I didn’t have enough in my savings to float me or set me up for a new place and an expensive move. So I had to scramble.
Luckily, I was offered a new job, just for the month of May, with the stipulation being that I’d be living and working in Charlotte, North Carolina, not far from Charleston, where my parents moved about ten years ago. It dawned on me that this was, though a temporary thing, the best (and only) option I had: I could put my things in Philly in storage, get put up in a hotel down south, work normal Monday-through-Friday hours, and visit friends and family on the weekends. (Philly was feeling unlucky and unwelcoming at that moment, so getting away for a bit to clear my head was an added bonus.)
The tour was honestly driven forward by “fuck it” energy. I didn’t schedule it because I had an album to promote, or anything to promote. It was because I didn’t have a job or anything else holding me back or tying me down. If life was going to be difficult, it might as well be fun, credit card debt be damned. “I could figure it out later” is, often, a way I approach things, for better or worse. I was pissed and motivated, thinking: “I’m having a shitty spring, and I’ll be damned if I have a shitty summer, too.”
Now, it’s fall. Since returning to Philly, the financial difficulties I’ve experienced as a working musician unfortunately haven’t changed. Still without housing or solid footing, I’m planning to report more frankly on a second “tour” of sorts, not into the sun-drenched New England summer, but back into the weeds of the Southern DIY scene. While I figure out next steps in the city that really launched my music career, I’m going to document my frank experiences filling in the gaps down South as I pick up odd-gigs, couch surf with friends, and, yes, temporarily move back with my parents in Charleston for a few weeks. This is, as we’ll call it, the “Southward Scramble.”
The last time I did this — traveling and playing music without a home for months on end — I was 29, and I felt like I’d truly arrived, like at last I’d joined the party in a big way. I was making decent money, sleeping in hotels, playing for by far the biggest crowds of my life up to that point – and it was all partly enabled by the fact that I wasn’t paying rent. People outside of the industry or the touring lifestyle might not appreciate this aspect, so let me lay it out: a lot of this, especially DIY touring, is enabled by living in dirt-cheap housing or subletting your room while you’re gone, if not giving up your place to fully live the peripatetic life. Those first few years in Philly, I’d sublet my room every time I went on tour. Adrianne Lenker from Big Thief has gone on record that she didn’t have a fixed home base for years, and she’s far from alone. I often think of the Magnolia Electric Co. documentary film The Road Becomes What You Leave. After four weeks, five weeks, nine weeks on the road, that really is what it feels like.
Scenes from the FEAST festival... including a tomato tent...
A year ago I played guitar on a two-week tour of the south in early September, for the band Sinai Vessel; we played all over Tennessee, the Carolinas, Georgia and Alabama. I’m traveling to a lot of the same places this time around, re-connecting with a lot of the same people I met then.
The next leg of my most recent “tour” began this week. So far, in addition to playing my own shows in Athens, Marshall, and Greenville, I’ve also checked out some other concerts and festivals, like the two-day FEAST series in Hillsborough, North Carolina. At FEAST, and throughout this Southern journey, I wondered and am wondering: am I just an interloper, someone who doesn’t, can’t, won’t belong here? Am I crashing the party? Socially, this felt less like a modest music festival, bringing curious and adventurous people from all over the country or world – although there was at least one international traveler I met, a man from the Middle East seemingly on a mission to find as much old-time music as possible throughout the south – and more like a reunion or gathering for a specific social scene, a large group of close old friends. Meeting fellow travelers and out-of-towners, I got the sense that we were on the periphery, like our presence at FEAST was unexpected, unlike locals’. It was hard to tell whether the event was meant to attract too much of a crowd beyond the core group of friends and artists.
At FEAST I caught a lot of different acts by artists both familiar and new to me. The great singer and songwriter Kath Bloom, hailing from my home state of Connecticut, always struck me as a truly idiosyncratic and unique artist claimed by, but never quite belonging, to many scenes over the decades. Just having her there, as a presence, was a gift, and her music is a balm. I was also bowled over by a performance by Joseph Allred, a finger-style guitarist who produced great, burgeoning skeins of sound as his metal fingerpicks, like steel-toed dancers, flicked, scraped and dragged across the twelve strings of his acoustic guitar. And on night one, in the moonlight, Weirs, the ensemble of the event’s main organizer, performed their 20-minute arrangement of the long, big ballad “Lord Bateman,” from their out-that-day new album Diamond Grove, accompanied by a shadow-puppet play depicting the narrative, a visual and sonic marvel of interpretation. The great, centuries-old ballads, by sheer force, impose a gathering and attentive spirit, and for twenty minutes, all of us out there, in campers chairs or lying on blankets in the dewey grass, were brought along by the narrative: we sailed east and we sailed westward, we arrived at long last at Lord Bateman’s castle, where there was a warm slice of bread and sweet wine waiting for us. The song, and Weirs, invited us all equally in, whether we were from nearby or crossed literal seas to be there. Yet the ballad ends with a reminder that, sometimes, there is not room for everyone: Lord Bateman, reunited with his true love, forsakes his new bride, and, like us, “she shall leave in coach aree.”
I recently interviewed singer-songwriter Will Oldham for a book I’m working on, and he spoke enthusiastically about going out to see live music while on tour:
There's this false image where people are like, “Wow, you're touring. Isn't that wonderful?” And like, you know, if people are gonna keep saying that, I better fucking make it wonderful so that there's some value to what they're thinking, you know?
There’s places, like Lisbon, New Orleans, Istanbul, when I play those cities, [I] always book at least two nights off. Because they’re such rich, intense... musically rich, intense places to spend time. And so you wanna be like, “Well, if we’re gonna go all the way to Istanbul, we're not gonna go play and then get on a plane in the morning and go back to Berlin. We're gonna stay in Istanbul for a few days and try to see as much music as possible.”
I feel the same way. I’ve got a car, and connections all over the country, and my instruments, and my brain and the tools I need to write. I hope you’ll enjoy following along.
