colleen

On top of having a clear set of guidelines to help me make decisions on which shows to accept, I have also made a conscious attempt to shift my mindset towards fully accepting that travelling to play shows is *not* an opportunity for sightseeing: yes, it’s amazing when you do get to see the place, but often it just does not happen and you need to make peace with that and learn to enjoy the snippets you do see on your taxi or car ride or the view from your hotel window (I guess it does help that by now I have already at least partially visited  most of the cities I’m playing). Instead, my focus is now on performance, rest/refueling and people (from the venue staff to the audience, from old to new friends, acquaintances and colleagues).
I have also made a point of removing my main anxiety trigger: taxi rides alone at night, especially over long distances. In my 21 years of live playing, I have always been on my own except for a handful of shows and on the whole I can say I’m a well-seasoned traveller (I don’t even notice when the plane takes off). I have been on countless taxi rides, but I had a David Lynch-worthy experience with an Uber driver at night in San Diego in spring 2017, and since then any weird behaviour in a driver puts me on edge. Before someone suggests I ask for a female driver… it *was* a female driver that gave me the scariest ride of my life.
So I really try to avoid car rides at night and I simply don’t do Uber or Lyft. This means I either stay at a hotel within walking distance of the venue OR I need to be guaranteed a ride with someone I can trust OR I stay with friends or kind acquaintances. This worked really well on this last tour and I am so grateful to every single person who has made this possible: as always, a little help can go a long way and make such a huge difference in terms of our felt experience.
Because that’s the thing: sometimes when we want to play less, it’s not at all about the playing, it’s about a very specific aspect of the whole situation that can be legitimately too hard to handle.

Photos from my show in my adopted hometown of Barcelona, L’Auditori, presented by L’Afluent, 14 December 2023, with my beloved Soundgasltd Space Echo that had never sounded so clean and clear!

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