Photo credit: J. Elle
Tell us about your tour vehicle. Any notable breakdown stories?
I have a British racing green 2010 Mini Clubman, which I LOVE. There are 134,212 miles on it (right now, but I’m mid-tour ????).
I’ve got a million breakdown stories, BUT the craziest one is with my last Mini Clubman. That one was a silver white 2012 with a sunroof. So I was on my way back to NYC from Austin and was going through Maryland near Baltimore when a random piece of crumbling infrastructure fell and BOOM shattered my sunroof. What are the odds?
Of course, I immediately found a place to pull over. I’ve got all day to make it back to the city so I make some calls and see if I can’t get it fixed. One guy seems game and can do it today, but he wants like two grand. I tell him, “You call around for the part and call me back in an hour, and I’ll see if I can’t get the money together.” I go into some nearby suburb and make more calls, fill up the gas, and get an oil change, and he calls back. I won’t get into it, but the dude has found the part and wants me to come to his house, not the glass shop. I’m like, “I don’t know.” The dude starts getting pushy, and the whole thing goes from a little bit fishy to smelling like the Red Lobster dumpster in August.
Naturally, I back out of it before anything escalates and try to get Safelite (a big auto glass company) on the phone. They don’t have the shop numbers listed on the website, but I get ahold of national customer service and they tell me they don’t do sunroofs, but they can crash wrap it so the glass won’t fly everywhere as I drive home. I’m like, “Awesome, I’ll go right over to your nearest location.” I get there, sign in, give ‘em the keys, and about an hour later, they tell me they don’t do sunroofs and won’t sell me the crash wrap ‘cause insurance ????.
I then proceed to visit every car parts place in metro Baltimore looking for crash wrap…nothing so I head over to Walmart to get some trash bags and improvise with that and some gaff tape. Driving around town everything seemed all good so, cautiously pleased with myself, I thought “Let’s go, onward to NYC.” I get on the highway and all is still good, a bit noisy but still good. Then about 4 miles at highway speeds I heard a loud WHOOMP sound. I looked up real quick and saw that my fix had exploded into a big balloon about to whip off of my car and hit a truck behind me. I look back to where I’m going and BANG I slam into the back of a 2021 Toyota Highlander. I pull off the road leaking fluids everywhere, the two ladies in the Highlander are pissed at me but otherwise unaffected. My cute little mini meanwhile looked like it went 10 rounds in some cage fight with a sadist and a checked-out ref…
Anyway, after much ado roadside in the hot July sun, I got it towed to a shop in the middle of nowhere and they were like “your car is probably totaled but we’re leaving for the day.” So off they rolled to enjoy their long weekend with me there sunburned and alone in a cracked asphalt parking lot near where you dock your Boone. After I kinda came to I realized I was out in Nowhere, Maryland with a bunch of gear, no car, and no way home. My phone was dying (thanks AAA) so I did what any self-respecting pre-internet transient would do and walked a couple of miles to the highway and hitchhiked into Baltimore, got a car to BWI (thanks Dave at the Shell station) rented a Prius, came back for my gear, loaded up and headed back to NYC.
There’s more to it but I think I’ve gone on enough. Suffice it to say it was rough. The upside is my musical community started a GoFundMe and raised enough money for my current Mini, a full tank of gas, 6 months of insurance with 3 dollars left over for a coffee. I’ve rarely felt more loved.
How do you eat cheaply and/or healthy while on tour?
Some guy in Austria told me one time on tour “If you see a vegetable…eat it” so I do subscribe to this. If I don’t it’s pretty easy to slip into the hot wings & tequila diet (and the inevitable sickness crash). Other than that, I see my occupation in its most ancient sense, with the “sing for my supper” component intact, so I rarely pay for food in an active tour scenario. Being an opportunivore also helps. I must say I do have the alpha-gal allergy (I can’t eat mammals) but that’s fairly easy to navigate these days what with the vegans and that around.
How many strings do you break in a typical year? How much does it cost to replace them?
I break a string about once a year honestly. I get too sweaty to hold onto a pick so I’ve always just played with my fingers so there’s not too much string-rending force. They will get a little tarnished so I do buy the fancy D’Addario XS coated strings and boil them when they get filthy so I get about 4-6 months of hard play out of them usually. All in all, I figure I spend about 40 bucks a year on strings (maybe 80 if I’m touring with somebody who breaks them).
Where do you rehearse?
I kind of compulsively practice wherever BUT if a rehearsal space is needed (like for a band/at weird hours) I rehearse at the beautifully eclectic Wildwood Recording Studio within King Killer Studios in Brooklyn. It’s a wonderland of instruments, pedals, keyboards, and amazing ephemera (including a legit piece of the Death Star) owned and operated by the amazing and talented Sonny Ratcliff & Georgia Weber. I like this kind of environment for two reasons. The first is the immediate access to all kinds of sounds I might need. The second is, rehearsing in that kind of overstimulating space simulates a real-life performance in the best possible way. I’ve got to overcome the cool stuff to nail down what I’m doing.
What was the title and a sample lyric from the first song that you wrote?
Whew. “Flowers in the Rain.” I’m pretty sure it was just “Flowers in the rain, raindrops fallin down again.” There was more, maybe something about moving away (we did that a lot) but I was like 13 (so a few decades ago lol) and that’s definitely all I remember.
Describe your first gig.
My first gig (of my own music anyway) was in the mid-90s in the balcony/mezzanine of a coffee shop in old town Conyers GA called the Java House. It was a pretty cool vibe. An old barber shop at one stage, it was a cute little spot with lots of paintings of moonflowers and suns run by a retired English teacher and her partner. I’m not sure how they did it but part of the shop was up in this upstairs library thing and we sat up there and played down to the shop. It was pretty funny thinking about it now. The “band” was called some street sign name like “road hump” or “slow children at play” and featured me in a thrifted Jimmy Buffet T-shirt on guitar and vocals, Dr. Cool in his hot topic optical illusion button up also on guitar and vocals, Joegasm with black lipstick and a black turtleneck on the bongos, Mr. Travis in a Hawaiian shirt on lead, and Roadkill as the mic stand. We did an eclectic mix of my tunes, Dr. Cool’s one tune, and some half-assed acoustic arrangements of Nirvana. We also sucked. My mom even said so.
What was your last day job? What was your favorite day job?
Hmm…I’ve had a lot of jobs over the years…My last non-music day job was as a freelance handyman. I think the last thing I did was installing a vent hood in somebody’s rental property, either that or replacing some corroded pipe in a sink. It’s usually something like that or like “installing” a lightbulb. I have been known to show up at construction sites/restaurants and do a little unskilled labor now and then as well so honestly it might’ve been picking up trash or washing dishes.
Favorite day job, World of Science hands down. It was a retail job in a dying mall outside Athens GA at Christmas time and aside from the fact that I could buy semi-precious gems and Erlenmeyer flasks at cost, my coworkers were a pretty interestingly random bunch. There was crystal girl, a preppy college white guy just starting to admit to people he was gay, a fife and drum corp historical battle reenactor (who kept trying to get me to join the Masons), a pop-punk guy, and a New York expat songwriter who was trying to cool out (away from the junk) in our storied music town. Though it was short-lived (2 months) I got a lot of friends, stories, folk-rock records (from the songwriter guy), fountains, and rain sticks out of the deal. One of the best moments was when the pop-punk guy and the crystal girl waged war on the JC Penny with a few RC robots and some rubber band-powered planes while the reenactor dude played the fife in full revolutionary war gear. Good times.
How has your music-related income changed over the past 5-10 years? What do you expect it to look like 5-10 years from now?
I’ve pivoted to full-time music work (with some supplemental one-off things of course) in the last 5 years, but that’s a wide range of music and music-adjacent activities that change year to year. This year for example was a good one for summer working gigs in Long Island (go figure). Some years the money mainly comes from production/arrangement/session work. Prior to COVID, Live Sound was the main thing that made the numbers work but there’s less and less of that unfortunately.
In recent years performing my own work in my own kind of context has been pretty comparable to everything else (and way easier on my hearing) so I’m hoping to grow that in the next 5-10 to something that can support not just my life but also all the projects I’ve got lined up. I’ve always wanted to do a musical (despite my general distaste for musicals) for example, or a sprawling art-rock record with a band. I would also like to do an ambient soundscape record, an a capella record, and I’ve got an idea for a type of audio collage of found sounds that I’ve been brewing on awhile. I try not to have too many expectations but I’ve been at this a long time and I kinda suspect in 5-10 years that part at least will not have changed. That said, things have been going reasonably well so I’m hopeful I’ll be able to bring a bit more audience and a bit more support with me on the ongoing journey.
What one thing do you know now that you had wished you knew when you started your career in music?
Ha! I have been a guest artist /speaker for a few different college courses (in recording and music generally) so I have encountered versions of this question before and have had some time to properly brew on it. There are a ton of things really, but most of all I wish I had known about the physicality of music as a job and lifestyle. Students often ask “What should I get a head start on if I want to have a career in music?” My answer usually begins with “ok, first thing. Get a backpack. A big one. Second, Fill the backpack with rocks and take it everywhere you go…(wait for chuckles from the gigging musicians teaching the class)…This will prepare you for 80% of what you actually do… basic auto maintenance and fluency with spreadsheets are also useful”
That’s a bit of a joke obviously but (especially in a big city) it’s kinda right. My friend Darrell, a fantastic all-rounder capital M musician back home in Athens used to say “Playing is the fun part, they pay you to move stuff around.” In the day I thought that was a funny folksy observation. Now…let’s just say my current vertebrae have a bone to pick with my past hubris. It’s a little too easy sometimes to think of the physical part of you as some kind of meat mecha that is just there to give physical expression to the master art mind. The thing is, even if that is true, the car won’t run without gas, oil changes, and at least basic maintenance. Plus mind-body stuff is fascinating to think about and can help out in other aspects of your life. Yoga has been a very valuable tool for me in recent years to deal with some of this but some damage can’t be undone. Ultimately I’d tell my past self to stretch, rest, eat better, drink less, and try to live in the world, not in spite of it.