colleen

(tried to make it sound like a Captain Beefheart title)

So… this is how these shows I anticipated so much went.

Monday. Land in Ponta Delgada.

Tuesday. 12-hour visit of the stunning island, seeing its endemic bird species and subspecies.

Wednesday morning. Boat trip, bottlenose and common dolphins. Start to get digestive issues after lunch, put it down to hectic schedule and feeling emotional. Show. Digestive issues do not go away.

Thursday. Manage to drag myself through town at snail pace. Now something definitely feels off and the mental tug of war begins: my body and my instinct are clearly telling me I am getting sick with something and that a transatlantic trip is not a good idea. I even google flights back to Barcelona. But I don’t want to cancel Big Ears. Of course not. It means a lot for a European artist to play there, my expenses are huge, I worked hard to get the visa and… I just want to play. On a symbolic level too, cancelling my 251^st show just feels so wrong.

Make it through the flight. Get to my hotel in JFK for my night layover. Start to get chills, then finally throw up. Now I think coming here was a big mistake.

Friday. 5 am. Write to Big Ears to say I’m cancelling. Then on the phone to my travel insurance provider. First person talks to me like sh.t. The second is nice. Tears of exhaustion well up as I spell the digits of my policy number. After waiting for nearly 2 hours because of a video app bug on my phone, I speak to a kind and reassuring Mexican doctor, who tells me that because my symptoms started nearly 2 days ago, I should be better by the end of the day, and can probably travel and perform the next day. His words a literal injection of hope and relief. Hotel staff is also incredible, with the sweetest cleaning lady ever. WHAT KINDNESS CAN DO IN A MOMENT LIKE THIS. Reorganizing the next day takes the whole morning.

Saturday. Fly to Knoxville in time for my first meal in nearly 3 days and soundcheck. Adrenalin gets me through the show, which I truly enjoy playing. I only manage to catch 2 shows but they do wonders for my spirit, Digable Planets and Shabaka Hutchings.

Sunday. Fly home Knoxville-Atlanta-Barcelona.

5 days of nothing but sleeping, resting and making peace with the experience. Finally feeling slightly better now.

PS1: turns out it wasn’t food poisoning as I initially thought, but a rotavirus which affected many people at the festival. Which makes me feel a bit better as I now know I didn’t do anything wrong and didn’t even get particularly unlucky: it just happened…

PS2: the irony is not lost on me that after all my attempts at articulating how complicated live playing can get, these shows that were so important to me would turn out to be a textbook example of just what I meant by that…

PS3: the last photo cracks me up. I can imagine myself saying “It’s an animal about THIS BIG”.

Also, if you are wondering what the beautiful light contraptions are (they kind of look like speakers, so might be confusing), they are part of Andre3000’s setup and he was playing there that night!

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