LIVING THE DREAM - part I: What Does It Feel Like To Be A Touring Musician…That Can’t Tour Anymore

Here’s a long-winded blog post for you. I want to explain to our audience [aka “you” or “y’all”] how much our lives as musicians have changed in the past two months of pandemic-related cancellations, and generally what it feels like from the inside of an industry (field is probably a better word) that…might not exist for another year and a half? Might never be the same? Basically we’re having pretty wild big-picture conversations about our lives and livelihoods, so we figured y’all would be curious to hear it from the horse’s mouth.

At my band mates’ request, I’m separating my long-windedness into four different posts. 1 is this bittersweet background on the touring lifestyle, 2 is a relatively depressing overview of the touring business in its prior and current state and 3 is a deep dive into how we make (or don’t make) money from streaming. In 4 I’ll give some thoughts on how our band is changing or thinking about changing in light of all this. I’ll aim to end this whole thing with an ellipsis, rather than a dark cloud of gloom.  

First, a confession: we’ve been at home (rather than a van that feels like home) for three full months, and I’m thriving. I have a breakfast routine. I planted my first tomato plant. My housemate has a dog, “Satchel,” that likes me a lot, and I’ve been playing guitar every day. I haven’t witnessed a whole North Carolina spring for the better part of a decade. Honeysuckle suddenly happened, and then strawberries. You get the idea. For better or worse, I’m having semi-regular deep thoughts about the concept of home.

My baseline levels of stress and anxiety (this is why it feels like a confession) have actually decreased since the “shelter in place” orders took effect. I don’t mean I’ve been oblivious to the seriousness of the global situation, and I definitely recognize the mountain of accumulated advantages it takes to be comfortable in a time like this—but at this moment I can view our strange pandemic-altered world equipped with some newfound stability in my life, and it’s kind of a revelation.

We four Mipsos have been traveling between 120 and 210 days a year since 2013. Not all bands are touring bands, of course—some of my favorites have either graduated into more stationary lifestyles or chosen to spend their time on multiple occupations, both fine ideas—but we saw something glamorous and exciting in touring. I think it’s a perfect vocation for the post-college road trip phase of life. Also, more importantly, we knew we weren’t yet good enough at the thing we loved doing, and that we needed to do it a thousand times to get a lot better. I’m talking about tax evasion, folks. Badabing! Just kidding: eating road kill at rest stops. Gotcha again! It’s playing concerts.

I hold these truths to be self-evident: touring gives me some meaningful and electrifying days and weeks that I wouldn’t trade for anything…and it’s also one of the craziest chosen lifestyles I can imagine trying to maintain for the entirety of my twenties, let alone decades more (hats off to the lifers). There must be a German word for not remembering where you are when you wake up, but what about the feeling of expecting that feeling multiple days a week for years on end? Believe me when I say I’m not complaining. I love it—and I’ll also admit it can be a disorienting life of constant travel and, yes, loneliness and alienation (I’m only going to use words like that when I truly think they’re the right ones) as we move from one impersonal commercial space to another: hotel lobby, gas station, restaurant, venue, bar. I remember realizing once that every room I’d been in all day had been selling Doritos. 

I realize the average fan doesn’t have a good mental picture of our lifestyle. And that makes sense. Y’all only really see us on stage, and stage time represents something like 6% of our week. We spend more than 6% of our time wandering through gas stations contemplating snacks (our friend Courtney Hartman calls it the “zombie crawl” when it’s after a show…eerie silence, dead eyes, empty aisles, the harsh refrigerated colors…) Much of the day we’re packed like sardines in a van going highway speeds. (Only once has that almost killed us.) Something like a thousand highway hours a year.

And then we have those maddening hour-long gaps between sound check and dinner or between the drive and sound check, never enough to fully start and finish a task. I’ve fantasized about bundling those hours and cashing them in when I get back home, where I’ve never felt like there’s enough time to wrap my head around anything except a load of laundry before leaving again. Again, not complaining. But I can see it all a little bit clearer now from inside this moment of relative calm.

We have a running joke in the band—or not so much a joke as an anthropological phenomenon that we keen observers of baby boomer (it’s not a slur!) behavior have noticed over and over. It’s when an older guy—a well-meaning dad- or granddad-type guy—looks at us over the merch table and says, “Living the dream.” Not asking, but telling. Often it’s like a sigh and a smile and a slight shake of the head as he surveys us lucky young ones, “Look at y’all living the dream.” He looks at us and he knows exactly what our life is like—it’s the dream! We’re living it! He can picture it now!

I’m assuming his dream isn’t wandering through gas stations across America, but I don’t blame these guys for the misconception. Maybe we’d be smarter to maintain this mystique—it probably sells more records than honesty. We could start posting beach selfies from last summer and pretend we’re quarantining on a private island, but that would be a difficult lie to maintain. Plus, there’s something fascinating in the apparent gulf between our actual lifestyles and what (at least some) Mipso fans imagine as our lifestyles. Transparency might not be very cool, but in this case I think it’s more interesting. So mystique-lovers read no further. We’re going to attempt to use this fanclub blog space for honesty.

joseph

p.s. read parts 2-4 on our fanclub