Points of failure: The full view
- 2 hours ago
- 3 min read
In April I completed something that started twenty years ago.
The month began with a monstrous 32-hour drive with my band. We travelled from Chicago to Vancouver to start a tour. I kept my wits throughout most of it, not until hour 25 did my mood sour. I became cranky; at odds with the present moment and anxious to arrive.
My view narrowed only to the tight quarters surrounding me.
What I'd momentarily lost sight of was that this specific tour had taken over two decades to materialize. We were supporting a well-known band who I'd idolized growing up. And who at twenty years old, I’d booked to play a show in Santo Domingo.
I've lived another twenty years since then.
Once we arrived and the tour kicked off, it was clear something special was happening. At our headlining show in Vancouver, people who'd seen us the year prior came back and brought friends who doubled our crowd. On the support run, folks showed up already wearing our shirts, and wanting to engage. A song we'd released days before leaving became our fastest streaming track. Our email list and online numbers grew daily. People seeing us for the first time were texting friends in the next city to go to the show.
We’d found something we'd lost during COVID and had struggled to find since; forward momentum.
Yet somewhere around mid-way through the tour, I lost sight again. The cramped van, the missed meals, the late nights, the snoring. I started getting irritated by the normal quirks of the people around me. I caught myself after snapping at someone unjustifiably.
Around the same time, a close friend was venting to me about his first ever tour. Another artist had been added to one of his shows, bumping him from right before the headliner down to the opening slot. He was pissed.
I reminded him it had taken my band fifteen years of touring to earn that slot.
“This is the first time we're going on after the venue is mostly full. Think long-term," I told him. By the time the call ended I felt like an idiot. I had been committing the same offense.
I need to ask more of myself. Hold myself to a higher standard of patience, I wrote in a journal entry the next morning. I still had half the shows to play and each day became an opportunity to do better by my band, myself, and what we'd spent twenty years building.
It lodged my field of vision back into its proper place; the full view.
The discomfort, the exhaustion, the physical and mental grind are a feature of doing something real. They are not a bug. Learning to place distance between those and my reaction to them, that's the more difficult work.
As the weeks stacked up, I kept coming back to all the moments throughout this band's life where a narrow view almost ended it: members leaving, COVID cancellations, mounting debt, resentment over my own workload. Any one of those is enough to make someone hang it up. I almost did, more than once.
On the last night, both bands got on stage after a sold-out show for a group photo. Grins on our faces, knowing we'd come full circle on a dream planted in Caribbean soil.
The next morning I started the fourteen-hour drive home from Winnipeg to Chicago. This time I knew it wasn’t a standalone task to complete begrudgingly, but the last leg of a plan twenty years in the making.
