Rehearsal Diary, Part 1

We learn the songs, all the songs

In my ever-expanding effort to catalogue all the boring minutiae of a musician’s life, I present to you a two part diary of the band’s rehearsal for the upcoming tour. See new faces! Watch us troubleshoot new and old gear! Witness us fumble through rusty old material and try to figure out how to play songs that we only ever played in the studio. Stakes are high, folks. Tour starts in two weeks!

Monday, April 15

It is the first days of rehearsals for the A Peaceable Kingdom Tour 2024. We have rented out a large (location-undisclosed) building which we will fill floor to ceiling with all the collected music-making detritus of a 25 year music career; we will rearrange and learn songs from our upcoming record, As It Ever Was, So It Will Be Again, and flex whatever muscle memory remains on the songs we’ve been playing for the past two decades. We haven’t been a band that rehearses on a weekly or monthly basis for a very, very long time, so our tour prep always involves one of these week-long chunks of intensive woodshedding.

I arrive at the designated woodshed at 1 pm; our new production manager, Chrissy, is there as I park. I introduce myself. The crew on this tour will be mostly new faces — the FOH engineer and my guitar tech are the only holdovers from previous runs. While it’s admittedly nice to have the same folks working on your show — there tends to be less of a crash course on how we like things done — there is something to be said for having new blood. Interestingly, our crew makeup is majority women. That was the case on our tour in ‘22. I think it bodes well for the industry as a whole — we need more women in crew positions in music. Diversity, folks!

I’d seen pictures of the this space a few months ago when we booked it; it looks nothing like it did then. Every conceivable inch is crammed with road cases and gear boxes and mixing desks and amps and keyboards. Someone has run red gaff tape around the floor to designate “the stage,” but the rest of the room just looks like the storage facility for a defunct circus act.

Introductions are made all around — our new drum and guitar techs, our new monitor engineer, our new tour manager. Everyone seems kind and professional; of course, it’s usually not till around week three of tour that you find out that your lighting designer goes by the sobriquet “Ratfucker” and likes to do sprinting laps in the bus corridor at 3 am while chroming Arrid Extra Dry. But by that point, we’re all a little worse for wear, so Ratfucker is welcome.

The rest of the afternoon is spent patiently doing a “line check” and getting basic volume levels in everyone’s monitor mixes. We are doing this from scratch, not from a preexisting file, so it takes some time. A line check is exactly what it sounds like — the monitor engineer asks for each individual instrument or microphone (a line, as in a cable line) and makes sure it’s working. This goes surprisingly well considering that all of our gear has been sitting in a unheated storage facility for the past eighteen months. The only thing that doesn’t work is one channel of a pre/eq in my rack that has been broken for years and we’d just forgotten it was broken. It is summarily bypassed and we can continue.

We spend an hour getting starting-level monitor mixes for everyone and stumble half-way through a song before Jenny points out it is, in fact, 7 pm and we should just call it for the day. Ah, the romantic life of the performing musician.

Funk takes in the Cubs score

Tuesday, April 16

The line check is done; the cables are working and the amp tubes are firing. It’s time to make sounds. We start with “Burial Ground.” There’s some finessing to be done (I’d recorded the electric guitar line in the studio with my own particular approach and there is some wrangling to be done to transfer the notes to Chris Funk’s more capable fingers). A first pass is made; it’s rough at first but eventually finds its footing. This song, like a lot of the new songs, was largely a studio creation — even though we’d played it pretty consistently on the ‘22 tour. Everyone’s clearly done their homework, though — the third run through is pretty on the money.

We have a couple setlists we’re working off of, things I’d jotted down in a hurried few minutes a couple months ago. Of course, no setlist is ever final till you’re walking onstage; even then its not entirely safe from tinkering. A setlist written two months ago is not a setlist for the present moment and there is a spontaneous confab arranged around my amp head, where the two printed out pages of songs have been laid. Songs are added, songs ares scribbled out. There is much to-do about how to carve a mini-set into the show that would somehow mimic the “acoustic” 2nd side of the LP. Do we stay put at our stations? Do we move to some other part of the stage and sing into one of those ubiquitous steampunk microphones? There is talk of involving a gazebo. We’re just throwing darts at the wall, here, folks. Thankfully, lunch arrives to drag us from any further peril.

The afternoon finds us moving at a brisker pace; we tackle “Long White Veil.” Since Funk is on pedal steel for this one, I’ll be handling the picky electric 12 string part. It’s still missing the strummy acoustic guitar chords; Lizzy gamely volunteers to learn the chords. Lizzy is the sort of guitarist who doesn’t play chords, though, she puts her fingers on the neck and makes noises — to good effect, I might add. Which means we must literally teach her the chords. Another run through gets us closer, then it’s on to “Oh No,” in which we’ll be using the Tortured Pistons Department horn section: Chris Funk and Victor Nash. Bob, our new drum tech, will be filling out some of the necessary percussion parts. Again, it takes a few stabs before it feels like it’s on stable ground. Onward!

Lizzy learns “chords”

Wednesday, April 17

The morning begins with a roundup with Heather, our tour manager, and Eric, our part of our management team. We are playing a session for KEXP in Seattle next week and need to decide what songs to play and what gear to bring. There are some logistical considerations here, as all of our gear will be on a truck, speeding across the country toward Kingston, NY, at that time. Whatever we bring to Seattle will have to fly with us to the first show of the tour. Flying with instruments is an ugly proposition. Only last week, I flew to LA with a guitar in a very special and not inexpensive flight case made by highly qualified craftspeople in Nashville, TN, which was supposed to be impervious but was imperved nonetheless by the capable baggage handlers at Alaska Airlines: its iron-clad fiberglass shell had a nice crack in it when we got it back in Portland. I’ve seen Chris Funk check a guitar in a fabric bag — I kid you not — and have it arrive at the baggage claim carousel untrammeled. I have a suspicion that fancy flight cases are seen as a kind of challenge to airline baggage handlers: Oh, it’s got a expensive, special case, huh? Let’s see if it can handle this. KCHNNNNGG BANG.

Arrangements decided, it’s on to rehearsal. We warm up with another few run-throughs of “Burial Ground” — the vocal parts require some extra attention. Then it’s a valiant stab at “The Infanta.” It’s lovely to play the song with the trumpet part there; why we haven’t added a horn player prior to this tour, I’m not sure. A few more songs down and we gear up for “Joan in the Garden.” This one uses up most of the afternoon, but comes together more easily than any of us, I think, thought it would. Then it’s time to give our ears a break; we decamp to the (mostly shaded) courtyard of the rehearsal studio. It’s springtime here in Portland, folks, and one must get the most out of the sunny days. There’s not many of them to be had.

Back at our stations, we find ourselves with a tailwind; we run “Don’t Go to the Woods,” “Bachelor and the Bride” and “Don’t Carry it All.” We’re messing with arrangements on some of the old songs to freshen them up, and so some experiments are made. Some are kept, some are abandoned. We run “Oh No” again and it starts to feel, really, like a song. One that you would play in front of people. Heady times!