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!

Chers toutes et tous

Je passe au Français pour ce court post destiné à vous annoncer la belle nouvelle de ce concert organisé par les Eveillés auquel je participerai le mercredi 10 avril à La Gaîté Lyrique à Paris. Je passe en premier, donc venez tôt si c’est pour me voir! Set d’1 heure pendant lequel je jouerai Le jour et la nuit du réel.

Les Eveillés ont déjà récolté plus de 95 000 euros de fonds au cours de leurs événements passés, destinés à aider les personnes réfugiées /exilées à Paris. Les dons sont directement reversés à plusieurs associations travaillant sur le terrain et vont de l’aide juridique et administrative aux soins les plus urgents, entre autres. Etant donné la complexité et la gravité des phénomènes menant à ces situations humaines tragiques, étant donné également le sentiment d’impuissance qui peut nous envahir face à une réalité qui nous dépasse en tant que simples individus, je suis heureuse de pouvoir participer à une initiative qui permet d’apporter une aide concrète et bienveillante à ces personnes au cours de leur parcours dans mon pays d’origine. Vous pouvez retrouver beaucoup plus d’informations sur la page Instagram des Eveillés.

J’espère vous y voir nombreuses et nombreux. Merci d’avance.

Dear everyone, I am very happy to share the dates currently booked for the first half of this year. Not only that, but I will be celebrating my 250th show as Colleen on 20th March in the middle of the Atlantic ocean on Sao Miguel island in the Azores archipelago for@tremorpdl and I find that such an incredible and beautiful coincidence (I mean seriously: what were the chances of a 250th show happening in the middle of the ocean???).

Just as incredible for me is the fact that show #251 will be at one of the very best festivals in the world, @bigearsfestival in Knoxville, TN, on 23rd March.  I played there back in 2017, just at the moment I was finishing my first electronic album, A flame my love, a frequency, and I remember coming back with my creative batteries fully charged by the energy of the festival. I have a feeling that the same thing is going to happen again.
Another show that promises to be super special is the one on 4th April at the spectacular Sala del Paradiso of Museo dell’Opera del Duomo in Firenze, Italy: a super rare opportunity to play surrounded by centuries-old sculptures and works of art from the cathedral of one of Italy’s most beautiful cities. This also resonates deeply with me, since stone carving lessons in Paris led me back to music-making in 2010 after a long creative crisis. The event will be streamed live and then archived online, so keep your eyes peeled for more details.
I am also super looking forward to @elevate_festival in Graz tomorrow 29th February, the Nuits Botaniques festival @botanique_bxl in Brussels on 1st May (Belgium was the first foreign country I played in 2003 and it is a country dear to my heart),  Lyon in my native France at the @operadelyon on 21st May, curated by Richard Robert who has supported my work for more than 20 years now, and last but not least a return to my second most played UK city, Bristol, at beautiful @stgeorgesbris on 30th May!
Massive thank you to everyone who contributes in one way or another to these shows happening, from my agents to promoters to venue people and of course you the audience 🙏🙏🙏❤❤❤
🙏🙏🙏 @gomez_servin_andres for the poster

INFO AND TICKET LINKS VIA SONGKICK

REFLECTIONS ON GOING BACK TO TOURING – EPILOGUE: THE FROZEN BRAIN OF THE RABBIT IN THE HEADLIGHTS, OR STILL LOOKING FOR THE WORK-LIFE BALANCE UNICORN.
Allow me to mix my animal metaphors for the closing post of this series.
I am ending with a cautionary tale, or rather the true story of how I completely failed to solve a relatively easy technical problem at the last show in Lisbon @galeriazedosbois . By then I was pretty tired, but also very confident (too confident perhaps?) and when I saw that I would have yet another new mixing desk model on that night, I not only did not particularly worry: I did not check the manual, thinking the Aux Send architecture (which is what’s really important in my live rig) would be the same as in the 6 other desks I used. Wrong. Through a combination of negligence on my part, weird desk architecture and integrated effects, I ended up with an extra delay throughout the show that really messed the rhythm on many songs and totally distracted me. I only solved the issue at the penultimate song.
It took me a full week to come to terms with the fact I had not been able to troubleshoot something obvious and simple, no matter how “unlucky” I’d been. I only managed to forgive myself once I understood the true cause *and* implication of this failure: like a rabbit caught in the headlights, my brain, after what have been several years of non-stop work, and in the extra stress of being on stage, just froze.
I did and do take this episode as a warning of sorts: yes it’s great to play live again, but I still have a tendency to overwork, it’s my default mode, and while it’s in great part what has enabled me to make music for all these years and make a living from it, I know it could end up once again working against me.
This takes me back to the work-life balance unicorn which I had written about at the time I had decided to give up live playing in 2021. It’s still a massive subject for me, one that holds a lot of questioning on how one can value oneself outside of work, even when one is lucky enough to have a true passion in life. The irony is not lost on me that this is yet more “work”, albeit of a different – and essential – kind.

Photos are of the Lisbon show at Galeria Ze Dos Bois on 16^th December 2023: 1-2 by Ricardo Almeida, 3-7 Eros Giuggia. Because the show was sold out and ZDB is very small, I invited the audience to join me on stage, and everybody was sooo kind and patient while I tried to control my mounting stress… I think photo 5 totally captures the moment in which I am looking at the mixing desk and thinking “what the hell could be wrong?”. Extra special thanks to Marçal Xirau, Olga and Caetana for bearing with my neurotic state after the show, and to Marçal for his opening show.

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!