Tour Diary: Solo Times

Menlo Park, I'm Yours

Friday, February 22
Menlo Park, CA

This is a picture of me in 2000. I’m playing by myself, just me and a guitar, on some corner stage in a bar that is probably carpeted with some dingy second-hand shag soaked in stale beer. This was my humble beginnings as a singer-songwriter in Portland, back when I was a mere fragment of a Montana diaspora that was trying to make its way in the big city. Most of the shows I played in first year of being in Portland were solo shows. Even when the Decemberists began, I found myself splitting time between playing solo and playing with the band. In some respects, I was working out which of these modes best suited me — solo or with a band — and for a while, I was pretty split.

That question was settled when the band started getting busy, when we made our first recordings and started working with our first label. I missed those solo shows, though — something about them still felt vital to me. I wasn’t playing these songs without band backing out of necessity — in some ways, I thought a lot of the songs worked best without other instrumentation. I continued to stake out time to keep playing solo — I booked a few solo tours while the Decemberists were in hibernation mode; I picked up a few one-offs here and there. It remains an important part of my whole musical/performance thing.

And it is what has brought me to Menlo Park, California, today. I am playing a handful of solo shows this spring and these, two shows at a small theater in the Bay Area, are the first of them. I wouldn’t call this a tour per se, but I figured it was due a kind of tour-diary treatment.

Full disclosure: I underwent vocal surgery in October. I know that the prevailing wisdom is not to air one’s medical history in public, particularly that part of your history that relates to your career, but I thought you might like to know. As many of you are probably keenly aware, I’ve blown out my voice a few times during the course of a tour in the past; consequently, we’ve had to cancel or postpone shows. Any time we’ve done this, it is not a decision made lightly. It is a terrible feeling to have to cancel shows. I hate doing it. I managed to make it through the last couple Decemberists runs without canceling or postponing, but I was crutching on steroids a lot and it didn’t feel great or healthy. At the advice of my ENT, I decided to undergo an exploratory surgery in October. Maybe some major polyp or node would present itself, something that could be vanquished with the swipe of a scalpel. So, in October, I got wheeled into the OR at OHSU, was shot up with “vein champagne” and a strong anesthesia and allowed my capable ENT to dig around in my throat for the better part of an hour. Good news: there was no evidence of major damage, just some scar tissue that could be broken up. Bad news: there was no silver bullet, no nodule hanging out just beyond the detection of a laryngoscope that would run in terror at the surgeon’s blade. It’s just me and my aged, scarred vocal folds.

The jury’s still out, of course; it might be that breaking up that scar tissue — scarring that has been amassed over my thirty years of shouting for two hours three to four nights a week in public — it might be that that is just the ticket. I’ve been working closely with my very great voice therapist/coach in the intervening months and making a lot of progress. Learning new ways to sing; improving the way that I already sing. It’s inevitable to run into this kind of stuff when your earliest vocal teachers were the likes of Paul Westerberg, Bob Mould, and Shane MacGowan. It was recommended that I start putting together some low-pressure shows to get my recovered vocal folds back up to speed — and Menlo Park is where that is all going down.

The flight is easy and quick. It leaves at such an hour where I am able to spend my morning as I normally would, haranguing my eleven year-old to get ready for school, bidding my amiable eighteen year-old goodbye as he makes his way to the bus. And then it’s off to the airport. Guitar tech/ tour manager Troy is there when I arrive. He’ll be my only crew member for these shows. We skirt through the terminal to find our gate, only briefly marveling at the architectural wonder that is the new Portland International Airport Terminal. I don’t even get a chance to see Carson’s map and placards that have recently been installed. Here’s a photo of one of the maps, anyway:

As we touch down in SFO, the captain announces it is a balmy 56 degrees outside. The sun is shining. It feels like high summer, though, to my damp, moss-collecting PacNW bones. Standing at the Lyft/Uber waiting area, I feel a strange compulsion to throw my bags to the ground, cast off my jacket and run pinwheeling around the parking garage in the California sun. I resist the temptation; I don’t wish to alarm Tech/TM Troy unduly. We load the gear into the back of a Volvo crossover and are carried southward to Menlo Park.

Solo tours are insular, solitary things. I part ways with Troy at the lobby desk and find my room. I read my book. I do some emailing. I (blessedly) nap. I inform Troy that I will walk the ten minute distance to the venue rather than be driven it. I am ambulatory, dammit! Despite the fact that I have spent most of the day horizontal, I am a man who appreciates his own ability to convey myself by my own steam.

The venue is the Guild Theater. It is an old movie theater that has been renovated into a lovely smallish venue. Seated, I think it holds just north of 200 people. This will be an intimate show tonight. No punk rock club is the Guild, however: signage out front advertises that both Graham Nash and The Wallflowers will be having their own two night stands here in the coming weeks. Ryan Adams, too, which goes to show that you can be a creep and still carry on with a viable music career. It’s a new era, folks!

I make my way (as I am often doing in these diaries) towards the well-appointed green room in the basement. I set up in one of the rooms and then hasten to the stage where I busy myself with the functions of sound check. I won’t be playing these shows with my in-ear monitors and instead relying on the venue’s monitor wedges — those wedge-shaped speakers you see at the foot of a stage, by which performers can hear what they’re singing and playing. There’s some back-and-forth about sound frequencies on the various instruments — “could I get a little less low end on the guitar and just a little more gain” etc etc — and suddenly things are feeling pretty good. I haven’t sung through wedges in I don’t know how long — I’ve become very accustomed to my in-ears, but there is something nice about being able to really hear the room and not just what’s coming though the guitar pickups and the microphone.

I squirrel myself away in the backstage, waiting for showtime. I send the FOH engineer walk-in music, a Spotify playlist that I saved, I think, from some Brookyn Vegan curator: It’s called Splatter Platters and Death Discs.

Then it’s time for the show! I walk onstage to a kindly welcome from the crowd. I immediately am aware of how dead the room is — not in the energy/vibe sense, but from the distinct lack of natural reverb in the room. This often the case with these newly-refurbished music venues: folks (perhaps overzealously) tend to acoustically treat a room within an inch of its life. Revolution Hall in Portland is like this. It can feel as if you’re hovering in a sonic vacuum, making every noise — a squeaky chair, a murmured deprecation, the ice clinking in a glass — sound as is if it were broadcast through a megaphone. It can be a little eery. The only reverb one hears is of the digital sort that is rolled on to the vocal mic and the guitar DI line.

I haven’t played a show since August — and I haven’t played a solo show since…jeez… summer 2023 — so I’m feeling a little rusty. The crowd is sweet and forgiving, though, and I manage to make it through the entire set without any major clam. A Menlo Park miracle! This is what I played:

Beginning Song
Why Would I Now?
Angels and Angles
I Don’t Mind
Lake Song
Red Right Ankle
Leslie Ann Levine
Engine Driver
Don’t Go to the Woods
Hazards of Love 4 (The Drowned)
Black Maria
We Both Go Down Together
Rox in the Box
Rusalka, Rusalka / The Wild Rushes
—
Vincent Black Lightning
June Hymn

Even though I could feel it start to hobble a little bit at the end, there, the voice held up remarkably well. I skirt away to the backstage for a late night quinoa bowl graciously supplied by the venue’s obliging runner and finish off my glass of wine. Onward to night two!

Saturday, February 23
Menlo Park, CA (still)

I sleep badly. I always sleep badly on the first night of a tour, no matter how short. I’m not sure what how to account for it. To some people, a hotel room is an oasis of calm, freedom, and luxury. To me, a miserablist, it can sometimes feel like a prison. No matter: I am up and showering at a decent hour. I have a bagel and lox from the hotel restaurant. I order black coffee and they bring me a coffee with cream. Because it comes in a to-go cup with a lid, I don’t realized it’s creamed coffee till my third or fourth sip. Something feels off — it tastes so un-coffee-like — and yet I can’t quite figure out what is different about it. I don’t think I’ve had coffee with cream in, I don’t know, a decade? Two? This is the most remarkable thing that will happen to me today.

I lay in bed and listen to my audiobook (Empire of Pain by Patrick Raden Keefe). I shower. I walk up the street and get lunch. I visit a bookstore. I seem to be existing entirely on this long, straight stretch of a four-lane mainstreet and I am bound by the mechanics of the walk signals. They are plentiful. I spend most of my time in Menlo Park waiting for lights to change. Blessedly, the afternoon dissolves and I make my way (slowly, waiting for walk signals) back to the Guild Theater.

Sound check is brief this time — I just need to make sure everything’s still working. It is. I have yet another variety of quinoa bowl for dinner in the bowels of the theater. I send tech/TM Troy my setlist. Because I’ve opted for two totally different setlists over the course of these two nights, there are a few songs that are in questionable states of rehearsal. I run through them quickly. There’s some hope that muscle memory will do most of the work tonight. Here is the list I’ve assembled:

My Mother Was a Chinese Trapeze Artist
The Gymnast, High Above the Ground
On the Bus Mall
Make You Better
Grace Cathedral Hill
William Fitzwilliam
A Record Year For Rainfall
O Valencia
Me and Magdalena
Shiny
Carolina Low
Burying Davy
Sucker’s Prayer
Burial Ground
California One / Youth and Beauty Brigade
—
Mariner’s Revenge Song

I had some vision of merging Gymnast and On the Bus Mall together — they both feature a prominent Sundays-esque Cmaj7 — but I was a bit thrown by how unmeldable they were ipso momento. Never was there such a blown transition. The audience was very forgiving, however, and I was able to continue my concert without too much animosity from the crowd. I sometimes wonder if show-goers in the Bay Area are sick to death of hearing Grace Cathedral Hill whenever I’m within BART-distance of that landmark, but here I am playing it. They seem to mostly appreciate it. I play Ben Gibbard’s very good Monkees song, Me and Magdalena; I play a medley of Carolina Low and Burying Davy, which is mostly strange and cannot have satisfied anyone but the truly die-hards. I send everyone off with a version of Mariner’s Revenge Song — my first time playing the song in perhaps three plus years? — and I don’t even mess up the words. Good job, Colin. Way to clear the lowest possible bar.

A rush and a push and I’m off the stage, back in the friendly undercroft of the Guild among the photos of Fleetwood Mac. Mick Fleetwood, buckskin-jangled, looks down on me with a bemused expression. It will take some time before I am able to process it, but I think it’s one of begrudging acceptance. You too, he seems to convey, can remain here among us. For a while.