Tour Diary: Solo in Seattle

A very brief contribution

Photos/Video: Jason Colton

Saturday, March 15th
Seattle, WA

I’m not sure what constitutes a tour these days, at least in respect to my keeping these tour diaries. I remember, in the early days of the Decemberists, having a conversation with some road-hardened indie band who declared that nothing below two weeks should be considered “a tour.” I’m not sure what they were calling those sub-fourteen day runs — jaunts? Swings? Meanders? I think The Decemberists had just come off a grueling 12-day van ride through the central valley of California, a run that was capped with a show at — I kid you not — a franchised pot pie restaurant, and I might’ve been a little chagrined to discover that I had not actually been “on tour.”

By any definition, however, me driving to Seattle, playing a show, and returning the next day is probably not a tour. I suppose the accepted term is “one-off.” But, since it involves playing a show outside of my home, it’s going to fall under the aegis of tour for the purpose of this Substack. Unnamed road-hardened indie band from 2002, suck it. And so I began the Pacific Northwest leg of my 2025 Sotto Voce World Tour on Saturday afternoon, right after lunchtime. I drove my wife’s car.

The drive is absolutely unremarkable. It is practically indistinguishable from every other time I’ve driven the 180-odd miles from Portland to Seattle. It rains some of the time; sometimes it doesn’t and the sun comes out. There is traffic going over the I-5 bridge; there is traffic between Olympia and Tacoma. I listen to an audiobook called “The Time Traveler’s Guide to Medieval England” because I am clearly intent on making this rock tour as unrock as possible. Before long, the Seattle skyline appears over a tussock of fir trees on the horizon. There is more traffic. A guy with a plummy British accent is telling me, through the car speakers, about hocking.

I check into the hotel; I lay on the couch in my room, trying to conjure a quick doze that does not arrive. I gather my things and make my way to the venue, Town Hall.

Despite its name, which suggests some kind of communal meeting-place, this building used to be a Church of Christ, Scientist…Church. I’ll take it as pure coincidence that I happened to watch a YouTube video last week about the family tree of Western Esotericism which had the Church of Christ, Scientist on one of the fringier twigs of that tree and not some kind of directive from God that I should become a Christian Scientist. It’s a strange, squat neoclassical building surrounded by the sort of glassy high-rises one associates with downtown Seattle. I find the stage door and spirit myself inside. Ever-capable TM/Guitar Tech Troy is there already and the guitars have been set on the stage. Inside, the venue has a distinctly church-y feel: all pews and vaulted ceilings. The room reverberation is, as you’d expect, not unlike singing into a canyon — the very opposite of the Guild Theater’s almost clinical deadness from a few weeks ago. “It’ll tighten up once people are in the pews,” I’m told.

I sit backstage after this brief soundcheck and eat my dinner. Our management is based in Seattle; managers Jason and Eric are both in the backstage, hammering on their laptops, doing whatever it is managers get up to when they’re not at work, which, I suspect, is rare. I set about constructing the setlist, arriving, eventually, at something that approaches ninety minutes and seems viable. I have a few songs I’d jotted down as being contenders (All Arise!, Wonder, and Tristan and Iseult) from practices during the week. I canvass the requests thread from my Substack note; I check to see what The Decemberists played last time we were through. These are all part of my regular setlist-design calculus and I probably expend too much mental energy on putting it together — why can’t I just get out there and play whatever comes to mind? It might be that I’m too uptight, that I need parameters to my time on stage, an idea of how a thing might ebb and flow. Every time I’ve tried to pull a Neil Young and wing it, everything feels distended and lumpy. This is just my process; I should embrace it. In any case, this is the setlist I arrive at:

ALL ARISE (2)
TRISTAN (4)
RECORD YEAR (4)
REAPERS (5)
WONDER
LESLIE
ANGEL WON’T YOU CALL
ROX (2)
LAKE
ELI (4)
WOODS (3)
MAGDALENA
BURIAL (3)
HOL 4
RUSALKA
—
VINCENT (5)
JUNE (2)

The numbers in parentheses are capo positions. Capos are those hinged-clampy things you see guitar players put on the neck of their guitars; they move the base tuning of the guitar up or down, depending on which fret they’ve been set on. Time was, I only had a couple songs that called for a capo; it was pretty easy to remember what their capo positions were. Not so now. My rapidly degrading recall memory has dovetailed perfectly with an unsightly amassing of songs in all sorts of capo positions. I have to write that shit down.

The line to the bar at Town Hall is still long at 8 pm; we push showtime to 8:05. At the appointed time, I walk onstage to a very sweet welcome from this sold-out crowd. Not being on a lengthy tour where this kind of experience is a nightly one, I’m a little thrown. Of course, having a thousand people stand up and start shouting and applauding as soon as they see you can do wonders for a guy’s sense of self-worth, but I can tell you: there are two sides to that blade. But maybe that’s for another Substack at another time.

Of course, I whiff the first song, All Arise! It happens to be one of the few songs that I actually rehearsed for this show and yet I find myself transposing lines on the fly as I mix up the order of the verses. Typical. Just goes to show what rehearsing gets you. The rest of the show, however, proceeds with only a few more lyrical fuck-ups; by that point I think I’ve sufficiently conditioned the audience to believing that those mishaps are just part of the show. Suckers! In those few moments, though, I can hear the voices of the crowd singing along and I realize that they’ve actually taken my instructions to heart — that everyone should feel free to sing. Hearing everyone’s voices in that echoey shrine sounds really heavenly and I clock the setlist for more opportunities to get people singing. I opt for the more upbeat Suckers Prayer when Don’t Go To The Woods comes around — it occurred to me during Eli, The Barrow Boy that they are perhaps a little *too* similar. Or at least it would feel redundant, vibe-wise. I manage to get through Rusalka, Rusalka without nary a lyric slip (knee, chest, chin, breast) and hustle off the stage for the encore break. Wanting to hear more of those voices singing, I swap out June Hymn for Mariner’s Revenge Song; a thousand voices sing the dying cries of a doomed mother and her avenging ghost-form. It’s really lovely:

And then it’s farewell to this oh-so-accommodating Seattle crowd and I’m backstage, recuperating, having a final half-glass of wine in celebration of the night. As per usual, the hotel bed beckons and I catch a ride with Manager Eric up the hill to the Sorrento where I promptly say goodnight to the Seattle skyline. Tomorrow will undoubtedly be clouded by the sort of hangover that 3/4 of a bottle of red wine will wreak on a 50 year-old body, but tonight I am blessedly free of that. Sweet Dreams!

I have two more shows in my Colin Meloy Sotto Voce World Tour 2025:

March 25 - Dublin, IRE - Vicar Street (still tix here)
April 1 - London, ENG - Union Chapel (sold out — thank you!)

And The Decemberists are heading out on the road this July:

July 16 - Ottawa, ON - Ottawa Buesfest
July 18 - Halifax, NS - Halifax Jazz Festival
July 20 - Portland, ME - State Theatre
July 22 - Bethlehem, PA - The Wind Creek Event Center
July 23 - Hammonsport, NY - Point of the Bluff Vineyards
July 25 - Cleveland, OH - TempleLive at Cleveland Masonic
July 26 - Madison, WI - The Orpheum Theatre
July 27 - Skokie, IL - Out Of Space Skokie [Pre-sale begins April 4]

(Presale for the U.S. dates begin tomorrow, March 19, at 10 am. Sign up for the code HERE.)
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