colleen

23 FEBRUARY 2024: ALBUM LISTENING SESSION IN CHIQUITA ROOM, BARCELONA

On 23rd February, we will hold a listening session of Le jour et la nuit du réel at art gallery Chiquita Room in Barcelona and you can book your ticket here. I will be there to present the album, show you the scores and patch sheets so you can see some of my process up close, and we will hold a Q and A afterwards, all in a relaxed and cozy atmosphere! :-))))

REFLECTIONS ON GOING BACK TO TOURING – PART VI: TOURING MY WAY, OR SLOW AND STEADY WINS THE RACE
The ability to accept the two sides of the coin inherent to most life situations is a newfound strength for me, one that allows me to go past my more rigid black-or-white views of the past and see with utter clarity that yes, I do love playing live, yes, travelling for shows has enabled me to see more places and meet more people than I could ever have dreamt of, and yes, live shows are and always will be the only way we have of being present in a room with our audience via what unites us, so that I am now fully re-committed to this in the (hopefully) long run and can act accordingly.
Because a balanced view is the necessary start, but it then needs to be implemented into an equally balanced action plan. In my case, I now fully, unapologetically take into account the specifics of my life and the standards I want. So, given I’m 47, need a lot of rest (always did, but even more now that I’m older and my health is more fragile) and have 2 cats, including one (Sol) that I would describe as “high needs”, the action plan rests on 4 pillars, the first 2 non-negotiable, the last 2 mostly-non-negotiable.
1) Except for the US, where the nature of the territory and its distance from where I live forces me to go in concentrated bursts, I don’t “do touring” the traditional way: I play one-off shows or 2 shows on 2 consecutive days, spread over the year at intervals I consider reasonable (obviously it’d be exhausting if I played one-offs every week).
2) I only play shows I’m really excited about (although sometimes I have to turn down a show because it is just too hard to get there or my plate is already too full). This is made easier by decision 1: traditional touring involves filling gaps, which can mean playing shows you wouldn’t have played otherwise.
3) I don’t play shows in the middle of winter or summer, especially not North in the winter and South in the summer: extreme climatic events are becoming more and more frequent, and it is counter-nature and dangerous to play (or even attend events) in extreme weather conditions.
4) I don’t play outdoors shows – see decision 3.

Pictures are of another favourite concert of last year, @le_guess_who in Utrecht on 11 November 2023 at beautiful Janskerk with amazing lighting, the last ever Le Guess Who show in that church, and I got my first standing ovation – I was so moved 😍

📷🙏🙏🙏❤😍 1,2,5,9 @tristtristanstan; 3,4,6,7,8 @mherlow ;10 @annebakkermusic

COLLEEN BANDCAMP ANIMAL RESCUE INITIATIVE: A LOOK BACK AT WHAT WE HAVE ACHIEVED IN 8 MONTHS + HELPING @sosgalgos THIS MONTH
It is getting clearer to me each day that the meaning of life is love and empathy in action, and anything we do every day to get to that place is time and energy well-spent: I am so grateful that I started this project last year, and even though it’s a drop in the ocean of helping to relieve animal suffering, I am so glad you have helped me create that drop, and to celebrate it I made a video showing the 9 organizations that I gave 1400$ over the course of the past 8 months.
I also cannot believe how my song “Conditional”, which was originally about making one’s happiness conditional upon getting something or someone, sounds like it could have been written from the point of view of an animal waiting for help and love. I also love that this was originally a commission from Moog to betatest their Moogerfooger plugins: who would have known it would end up being a catalyst for a donation project like this???

Today is Bandcamp Friday, the day that Bandcamp does not charge its 15% commission, therefore an ideal day for all charity projects. This month we are helping galgos (Spanish greyhounds) by donating to Barcelona-based organization @sosgalgos . Yesterday was World Greyhound Day and sadly here in  Spain, this is the month in which galgos and other hunting dogs get abandoned en masse because it is the end of the hunting season.. 

There are now 3 Colleen songs or EPs you can buy on top of “Conditional”: A Flame Variations, Mort aux Vaches and “Organ song 1995”. They are clearly indicated by FOR ANIMAL SHELTERS after the title.
THANK YOU SO MUCH 🙏🙏🙏❤❤❤
All the organizations are tagged in the video on Instagram if you wish to make a direct donation. 🌞 They are: Peluditos con amor, Columbia; Fundación Trifolium, Spain; from Ukraine: Sirius Shelter, Animal Rescue Kharkiv, Shelter Friend Ukraine, Gostomel Shelter and from Germany helping Ukraine: Petners Berlin; from Spain: Fundación Benjamín Mehnert, Huella de Jaen

Touring subjects the body and mind to a lower standard of the essentials of life and to information overload: that is an undeniable fact and is nobody’s “fault”. For so long I felt like saying this could be seen as whining or a way of dismissing how much tougher other jobs can be; now I can finally see that one truth doesn’t negate another, and that the first step towards touring in a way that is sustainable in the long run is to recognize how truly demanding it is in the first place.
It is the piling up of bodily and brain stressors in a short window of time away from the normalcy of home that is problematic in touring, and that is why, in my opinion, for most “regular” people, touring is safe only in short bursts. There are many reasons why one may have to go through the classical grind of the “one show per day for a month/whatever length” classical touring schedule (economics of course, but also preferring to be away just once and then be done with it). As far as I am concerned, I would end up on the floor if I did this.
A non-exhaustive list of stressors: standing in line repeatedly to check in your suitcase, go through boarding pass and/or passport control, then security, board the plane, go through immigration control, get your suitcase back (on some days, this can pile up to 3/4 hours). Long travelling hours in a plane + usually one or two car transfers. Irregular eating and hydrating. Poor quality insufficient sleep, possible jetlag. Extreme air conditioning or heating.
For the show of the day and upcoming days, whilst more emails keep pouring in, often about future shows, keeping track of: travel schedule, times of load in, soundcheck, dinner, start of show, curfew, mixing desk model, merch situation, guestlist… Rinse and repeat.
If you are touring at the time of your album release, you have already worked through tons of details regarding the release itself and promotion work. In my case I also had to get a new US visa, which – as usual – proved to be both demanding and stressful.
Photos of my show closing the Ekko festival in Bergen, Norway, in the stunning setting of Slettebakken Kirke, on 5th November 2023, are all by Oddbjørn Steffesen.

REFLECTIONS ON GOING BACK TO TOURING – PART IV: I NEEDED TO BE IN GOOD HEALTH TO DO THIS AGAIN, OR: THERE IS NO WAY AROUND ADVOCATING FOR YOUR HEALTH.

I probably could have cut down this whole series to one sentence: you cannot work hard unless you are in good health. I couldn’t have done this 3 years ago, and I am acutely aware that I mustn’t overdo it, because I know I do have limits and aging also means that more shows is not the way it should logically go.

This is perhaps the most important topic related to touring – namely, how being in good health is actually a prerequisite for it, and how it can jeopardize your health – but I feel that, barring a few exceptions when very famous artists have had to cancel huge tours, especially at the time of Covid, this is brushed under the carpet, as if too private somehow or perhaps even embarrassing (aging and illness are probably the most rejected aspects of human existence).

And sure, a person’s state of health is eminently intimate and no one should feel like they have to disclose anything they are not willing to disclose, but to me this general state of affairs often feels like the elephant in the room, one that perhaps prevents us from hammering a truth that is however well-worth hammering: advocating for your health will probably be necessary at some point in your life, it will be probably be the hardest thing you’ve ever done and it will also be the most important.

I couldn’t have gone back to playing shows if I had not been proactive about getting proper treatment for my untreated, then undertreated autoimmune hypothyroidism, which left me in a zombie-like state from 2018 to 2020. When I decided to quit live playing in 2021, I was still in the process of getting my energy levels back to normal again, and my fear of not being able up to the task was the main factor in my decision to quit, along with chronic stress, which was exacerbated by that fear.

I won’t go into more personal detail here, but I still have to advocate for my health, and if you are going through health challenges, I would like to send you my encouragement to start or keep advocating for yourself, in spite of how hard and infuriating this can be.

Photos are of one of my favourite shows ever, the Berlin show at Silent Green on 20th October 2023.

23 FEBRUARY: ALBUM LISTENING SESSION IN CHIQUITA ROOM, BARCELONA

On 23rd February, we will hold a listening session of Le jour et la nuit du réel at art gallery Chiquita Room in Barcelona: I will be there to present the album and we will hold a Q and A afterwards.

It is one thing to intellectually understand the proverbial truth of the “two sides of the coin”, it is another to truly emotionally accept it. Perhaps that was my main problem in the past with live playing: I fantasized about a magic carpet that would enable me to just land in the venue, play and then go home, without all the stuff that can go wrong in real life travelling.

Last spring, I started to educate myself on Buddhism. I am fascinated by the accuracy of its views on human nature and psychological suffering: in a nutshell, we cling to what we want, reject what we don’t want, and mistakenly believe that happiness would come *if only* we could have just what we want and avoid what we don’t want. This spoke loudly to me, and although I am not a Buddhist, I have tried to act upon this in the way I emotionally react to things not going my way.

The US tour proved to be a perfect testing ground: it started wonderfully with a perfect flight to JFK and a perfect show at Public Records, but things soon took a different turn over 5 consecutive days. Philly was hit by a tropical storm and my performance at Making Time was postponed, then cancelled. The morning of flying to Toronto, I nearly missed my flight as I had not been told I needed an Electronic Travel Authorization. After the Toronto show, my friend Joni Void accidentally broke my suitcase, which I realized the next day at Pearson International Airport… only to be told a few minutes later that I was at the wrong airport. By the time I landed in Chicago, I was in desperate need of rest, but instead had to go and buy a new suitcase at Target, which took a good 2 hours since I had to check if all my gear fitted. The next day, I was told that the suitcase was 2 kilos too heavy, and I was plagued by this problem for the rest of the tour.

Amazingly, and in a first for me, I managed to let the stress roll over me without dwelling over each episode, and I felt very deeply that this was just “the other side of the coin”: I can’t have the amazingness of live shows without the risk-taking of touring.