Spain, marble notebooks, etc

Hi, my love.

Writing you in transit back to Amsterdam from Torrevieja, Spain. Returning from an incredibly hectic but gorgeous/rewarding string of shows.

It’s a miracle we made them happen.

Less than 24 hours before the first gig we got a call that the bassist was ill and couldn’t make the shows. A frantic search began immediately. After 12 hours straight of calling legitimately 71 bassists around the world (fun call! “Hi, are you free *tomorrow* to fly to Milan, meet an entirely new band, learn an entire set of v difficult music and play it for the first time in extremely large European concert halls?”) we finally figured out that our dear friend Keyon Harrold was in Châtellerault, France with two days off in his own tour. His superstar bassist Daniel Winshall joined us for the first two shows, and superstar David Idrisov of Belgium played on last night’s show.

(They were, indeed, free *tomorrow* to fly, meet an entirely new band, learn an entire set of v difficult music and play it for the first time in extremely large concert halls.)
(They killed it.)

The experience was absolutely exhausting, but it gave me a profound sense of just how worldwide our family is. Just how held we are. People were going truly out of their way. And they also were just … rooting for us. 

After the two hellish years I’ve had, I know in my bones that we are taken care of. I’m grateful for the continuous reminders.

Still, you’ll forgive me if this Sunday I’m a bit of a husk of a human. In the midst of all this José released a single on Friday, because we are slackers. It came out worldwide, but since the Rainbow Blonde Records staff is … me, that meant I coded it into our website on the plane Friday morning using a hotspot from the data on my phone.

That single, btw, is really really really special. I happened to co-write it, but bias aside it truly is. It’s an original Christmas song (in the great tradition of Jewish songwriters writing Christmas classics!) off of his next LP. Feel free to spin it if you want to feel cozy and warm and sip in a little holiday magic before Halloween. It’s on all the music services where you can hear music, but here it is on YouTube Music.

Music is coming out, shows are back. Another week has passed.

I usually write taalitalks on Sunday, taking stock in the moment. But this week I’ve jotted down notes as I went in my red marble notebook. I’ll give em to you in italics, pepper the ones that seem worthy of including.

This little sentence I’m typing, for example, comes to you from a tarmac in Seville, Spain. We’re delayed, or who knows, maybe we aren’t. 

I use marble notebooks to honor and, in some ways, relive, my childhood of writing. Those early moments. First or second grade. You got the notebook to write your assignments and notes in.

I don’t think it was meant for anything past grade school mundanity, but as far as 8 year old t was concerned that marble notebook was a freaking moleskin. And I was 8 year old Jewess T Hemmingway. I like to look back at them sometimes and giggle at the melodrama of my kid writing.

(Has anything really changed?)
(Thanks for reading my melodramatic adult writing, ilikeyou)

For years I bought spiral notebooks made of vintage books. I got them at feminist anarchist bookstore Bluestockings, on order from an epic artisan out of Washington. I loved that they made me not take myself too seriously and wrote most of my early songs in them. But I showed that little quirk to a friend-turned-very-much-not-friend-slash-person-who-wanted-the-worst-for-me-oh-god-lady-friendships-in-your-twenties-are-so-fraught who appropriated it with such gusto that I decided to move away from them.

I turned next to the real deal Hemmingway moleskins, even to colorful European books I found in Dutch bookstores. They didn’t cut it. Lately I’ve returned to the marbles that sparked my original wonder. Success, finally. They’ve been my consistent home for about a year now.

I love how they honor the moments as a kid where I felt I could access, somehow, the kind of words I was reading in the books I voraciously consumed. I love how they honor the moments where I felt I could perhaps string together such words myself.

In Valencia, Spain now. KLM canceled our direct flight from Alicante (yay, COVID!). Through a miracle we were able to secure another flight, albeit a messy one with a long layover through Paris.

I’m watching all of the humans crowd into their newest airport line. They all seem very stressed, as is usually the case. We don’t have status on KLM, so after seven years of touring I know better than to hurry up and wait to wait in line.

(Which is heading directly for an airport bus.)
(Which will then have them waiting.)
(For another line.)

But I’ll let them have the dignity of their own experience.

Seven years of touring. God damn.

I went on my first world tour when I was 26 years old. A guy named José James invited me out to sing background. At the time, he was just a famous friend. I was terrified of fucking up and also so young, so naïve, and so difficult. I had a young life’s worth of baggage with no life’s worth of tools to handle it.

On top of that, I had literally been sober for one month when we began that tour.

The face of a lady who’s about to have her whole life change

It’s a miracle I stayed alive. 

We started the tour in May and did over 100 shows that year. Over 100 cities. I remember it with incredible clarity and also with a haze over the entire year. Things come back to me that bring me joy, things come back to me that bring me shame. 

Paris now. Just landed to our layover. To my right, a runway. Another plane, just ascending into the sky.

Is there anything more romantic than that sight? A plane full of people, oh so magically being transported somewhere else. Making a promise to myself to pick up airport Ladurée macarons to make the hours go by faster.

(success!)

Tour, tour, tour.

Within a week I knew this was the pace I had been missing in my life. But I also met it with a very me feature: The ability (or curse) to experience the now as the only reality that exists. Forever. So when all of a sudden I was flying to a different city or country every day, my brain said, “Okay, cool. This is life now.”

Just like that. I don’t know that I ever stopped, even once, to really enjoy a city.

And when COVID ripped it away from us, my brain told me that this was now life. Forever. A life without touring. Stationary and foreign.

I didn’t like that life one bit. I’m grateful to have it left it in the rearview.

Tour feels different now after those two years of longing for it every moment. I drink it all in. In the van from the airport to the hotel I take in everything my eyes can consume. I’ve been hungry, I’ve been fearful. It feels good to see all this beauty again.

This stage view, for example, in Milan the other night.

Or, while we’re on the subject of Milan, this airport coffee which beat most coffees I’ve had anywhere else. Please enjoy my shock at the unlikely airport blessing.

I get emotional at almost every show now. I feel so much more present. At really special ones, I’ve taken to putting my hand on the wall for a second backstage to remember the feeling of the wall, the room. A tradition I started in Montreux that I told you about, from our true first show after all this time.

On the tarmac now, Paris to Amsterdam. A full, full flight.

I remember the flight when we moved to Amsterdam in the height of COVID lockdown. I wish I had filmed it, photos and words don’t seem to do it justice. An entire international jet, eight hours with only six passengers on it. Like the zombies came and we were the only ones who survived.

As morbid as it sounds, now that international travel is back I miss that empty flight sometimes. You know, when the guy next to you has real serial killer vibes and is farting up a storm the whole flight. Or when you’re sitting next to a family who refuses to wear their masks and also wants to scream their droplets all over the flight. Those times.

Our drummer and dearest friend, Richard Spaven, said it really well the other day. Essentially touring has become approximately 100-2000% more stressful. Every moment of it. Less profitable, more stressful. But the job is still the same, I told him.

But even in typing it to you I know that’s not true. The shows have been so good I’m putting my hands on the wall. If anything I said it to him in that moment, in the frustration and sheer body ache of having spent the past 24 hours working to replace our bassist. But it just isn’t true.

If anything, the painful difficulty is shouldering that part alone. The part where, at 1 am when we’ve finally confirmed Daniel, told the promoters and booked all his travel, I look at my watch and realize I need to be up in 4 hours for the flight to the show. Where I need to sing. And look pretty and stuff. Then I wake up at 2 am and think, “Do they have uber in Châtellerault France where he is?” and text him to book a car instead. Invoice it to us.

The part where I think, “Man, maybe I should have kept that EA job where my soul left my body at every moment and I was consistently-underestimated-and-disrespected-but-at least-I-had-a-steady-paycheck.”

The shows are magical. I was lying to Rich in frustration. But that difficult part… that is one to get used to.

So I share it with you. Like always. Every week for almost a year. And I feel better.

In the cab home from Schiphol airport. I don’t know when or how it happened, but every airport taxi out of Schiphol is a Tesla. I feel like such a fancy bitch.

The sun setting, the light hazy. Here in Amsterdam the ride from the airport takes 15 minutes. A luxury I never get tired of.

Home is a flexible concept, but grateful to be heading to where it is for us today. Tram tracks, three story brownstones. Our perfect, perfect street.

There will be a lot to heal from.

For all of us.

I try to give myself moments to do it, in between the continuing chaos of it all.

See you next week.

t