Tales From the Road

It's been awhile since I've posted. Life is ticking along nicely, and I'm pleased with it. The Sherwood Forest Faire has been very good to me, and I'm really enjoying the audience and the large cohort of friends I have as colleagues here. I've recently learned and memorized a 1584 instrumental piece by Galileo's father, Vincenzo Galilei, and I like it better than anything else of his I've done. There are 28 other pieces in that particular collection, and I'm really excited about tackling more of them in the future.

I head to Europe in three weeks! It's starting to feel real. Of course, most of the expenses are already sitting on my credit card, but that adds its own sort of relief to have firm plans in place. I'm thrilled to go back to Italy and explore some new places in addition to some favourites, see Croatia for the first time in years, and to finally fulfill my goal of busking Sarajevo.

My Italy plans include a week in Cremona, which I've only seen before as a day trip. I spent an afternoon performing there once, and I've found their city ordinances and I'm hopeful the polizia interpret them the same way I do. I'll also be busking Vicenza, which I only saw as a "weekend" vacation a few years back. This trip will involve several weeks in Umbria, my grandmother's home region; I've heard amazing things about Orvieto, in particular.

Most interestingly, I've got plans to meet up with friends in Tuscany! I scheduled my time in Pisa to coincide with a visit from friends who are giving/taking a tour. RenAdventures is organized by several close friends, and I'm really excited to hang out with them and their guests, some of whom are also friends!

From Chile to Peru to Ohio to Texas, it's been an intense few weeks. Most importantly, I've gone from two months alone to being surrounded by friends and family. It's quite a difference, and one I'm enjoying very much.

I have a lot of tribe here in Texas, both working at the Sherwood Forest Faire and among Austin-area locals. There are hugs, conversations, and delightful flirtations floating around me and I've been immersed to my eyebrows. It is good to know I'm loved.

It's a little hard to believe that it's the last week of my thirties, and what an amazing decade it has been. I look back on the things that have happened, and the growth I've had, and it's a little hard to believe.

At first glance not much has changed. When I turned thirty I had already been full time as a musician for five years, and I was in the midst of my first foreign busking tour. I've refined things, of course, but a core of Renaissance Festivals augmented by international street performing is still my fundamental business model.

It is with a closer look that the differences are revealed. I'm a far more skilled player and performer than I was at that time, for example. My festival performances are still anchored by playing in the lanes, but also include a solid stage show that eluded me throughout my twenties. The music that I'm writing is more complex, and I've taken up a deeply challenging historical repertoire.

Similarly, the basics of my inner monologue haven't evolved very far. I'm still buffeted by alternating moods of euphoric confidence and crippling anxiety. I am, however, better able to compensate with a deeper experience of successes to temper my insecurities and failures to moderate my arrogance. More importantly, I've got a much firmer grip on when I need to bring this information to bear, recognizing when I'm in an unhealthy mental space.

My body is changing and it's an interesting quest to find the balance between treating symptoms and changing my lifestyle; I miss caffeine but I feel so powerful without it. My face is becoming more and more my own, as smile lines beneath my eyes vie with the concentration wrinkles on my brow. My hairline is thinning and receding even as it greys to match the delightful amount of white in my new beard. The belly fat I've fought for my entire life has subsided only to redistribute to the sides so rapidly there are stretch marks, which is both a big victory and a new struggle.

And finally there is my personal life, which I keep strictly offline. I won't go into details, but I've gotten a lot better at asking for what I need in a relationship. I don't want anything different than I wanted ten years ago, but I'm a lot better both at recognizing when I have it and letting go when I don't. And, while I still find myself making the fundamental mistake of promising things I cannot deliver, it's happening a little less often these days.

I'm excited for my forties, and eager to see how I further grow and evolve in that time. Aging has been a fascinating experience for me, and I look forward to seeing what further turns it will take!

Living on the road is very different than vacationing. This is true in general, but especially when I'm traveling abroad.

I typically eat out of grocery stores, for example, even if I'm not doing the sort of light cooking that I do in the States. Eating out every day is not only detrimental to the budget, but brutal for health. It was important to acquire, early in my travels, the skill to pick up affordable picnic basics and build a long-term diet from staples such as bread, fruit, and cheese.

And then there is my daily schedule. I tend to work for 4 hours a day on those days when I'm playing, with five hours or so between my first and second sets. This leaves me part of the morning, midday, and the early evening to myself. I take a lot of rambling walks as my main recreation, but often I'll hit a museum or other tourist attraction in the afternoon. However, because of my schedule, there's typically only room for one.

It's by routines such as these that I've built a life for myself on the road, where it doesn't matter how frequently the scenery changes because the basic elements of my day rarely do.

I always appreciate when a child tips me from their own pocket, no matter how small the change. But today took the cake when a little girl tipped me from her own candy stash

It´s interesting and revealing to notice things that I screw up in languages that aren't my mother tongue. A lot of things that give me trouble in Spanish come from my muddy thinking in English. Times of day throw me, for example, but when I say ¨good evening¨ before noon it has a different connotation: in English I look distracted or ditzy, in Spanish I just seem ignorant.

Another such example is when to say ¨please¨ and ¨thank you¨. ¨Would you like some coffee?" "Yes, thank you" is often how I would respond, and it's wrong in Spanish. Arguable, it's wrong in English too, and this is where things get revealing. I hear "please and thank you" a lot as a shorthand, and it's always been somewhat irksome for me since it cuts short what could be vital social lubrication through polite manners. Still, it illustrates a larger point that we, as a culture, have lost touch with some very basic manners.

Thankfully, I'm getting an ever-clearer picture on how to change this in my own habits as I embarrass myself on other stages.

It has been a truly wonderful day, performing in Concepcion for the first time. The city is built for busking, and is filled with buskers, but despite their numbers and their amplification I found ample spaces to perform. I had a lot of fun and did quite well for myself, but at the end of the day one memory stands out.

A little girl, maybe six years old, had been handed money by her parents to toss into my hat. I thanked her and made my typical half bow, and she responded with an absolutely florid bow in return. I've been grinning about it ever since.

My plane leaves tomorrow for South America and I'm rather nervous. I've been to Chile before, and one reason I scheduled the trip the way I did was to have three weekends in my favourite and most successful busking city from my previous tour. Still, it is a place where I witnessed a theft of a woman's camera from off her shoulder, and has a reputation for being on the dangerous side.

A lot of my anxiety is less serious, though. I'm mainly concerned about catching buses, since the websites haven't let me purchase tickets ahead of time. I'm about to try again, at least for the two buses that are most important for my timing: nights when I haven't booked lodging because I'm planning on an overnight ride. Even so, the crossing into Peru is a bit tricky. From what I can tell, in guidebooks and online fora, the way to do it is to catch an informal taxi (colectivo) across the border to Tacna, and then grab whatever buses I can to Cuzco. Happily, I've had the foresight to give myself three days to manage any delays before I head out to Macchu Picchu, the most timing-sensitive plan of the trip.

So I head back into the void, taking the leap once more. It's a reason I savour travel as much as I do; it forces me to live in the moment and dance to the tune of circumstance. It's brutal on my psyche, but I never feel more alive.

I leave for Chile a week from today, and it's a bit intimidating even as I'm knocking out chores left and right. (Emails to festivals? Check! Income taxes? Check! Sales tax filings for $0 in states I haven't worked lately but that impose non-filing penalties? Check!) I'm wondering about what I may be missing, as well as the anxiety over the many things that could go wrong.

Plus, I'm looking further into the future. Do I want to return to the US via Milan or Munich this summer? Come back right before Pennsic or into the thick of it, giving myself an extra weekend of busking at the expense of treasured down time? Do the Holborn Praeludia look like a better fit for the 2018 or the 2022 albums? (Yes, I really do think that far ahead, and the 2020 album is set firmly enough in my mind to know they wouldn't be appropriate there.)

It's a whirlwind, and I'm looking forward to the moment when my butt hits the airplane seat. I stress beforehand, but once I'm strapped in my perspective changes and my anxiety drops as I focus less on what might happen and more on what is actually happening.

I'm looking forward to it.

I know it's been a hard year for a lot of people, but personally it's treated me fairly well even as I mourn for various people and events. I'd like to thank everyone who made this year so good for my music and travels; it's been a very full year for me, and I can't believe so much has happened in a mere twelve months.

I began the year in southern Ontario, Canada, recording Dulce Melos. I'm incredibly proud of how it came out, and of how ambitious I was with the complexity of its music. I continued my Baroque explorations, delved even further into sixteenth century music, and discovered some fourteenth- and fifteenth-century gems in addition to the Celtic and early medieval music which has long been my foundation.

From Canada I went to Texas, although it minimized my culture shock that I was living in Austin (unofficial motto: "Keep Austin Weird"). I had a truly splendid experience at the Sherwood Forest Medieval Faire, feeling myself absolutely at home among close friends old and new. It's a delightful show with a lot of heart and skill behind it and I relished the experience of playing there. Austin audiences were incredibly welcoming and generous, and between my colleagues and our patrons I had a magical time.

From the newness of Sherwood I returned to my stomping grounds of Gulf Wars, a large SCA (Society for Creative Anachronism) event in southern Mississippi. I had a great time, as my Canadian friends mingled with those I have in New Orleans. We did have a bit of an incident, however, with a massive storm system that swept through. I had just begun a set in the tavern when the intense winds and driving rains began, and I moved my setup to the minstrels' gallery (it's an amazing place). I spent the next few hours at my dulcimer, doing my best to add a bit of calm to the atmosphere. They're calling that night "Gulfnado", and it's a story that will always be shared by those who were there.

I then headed to Italy as I do most years, where I made some discoveries pro and con. Cities that have been good to me in the past, Padua and Bologna, had recently passed anti-busking regulations, and even the nominally friendly city of Perugia gave me some problems. In response, I broadened my busking to cities where I had spent very little time in the past, and was very pleased at my welcome in Prato, Terni, Foligno, and Pistoia. Taranto, Genoa, and Pisa were delightful and reliable as they've been so often in the past, and I'm pleased to have added Foggia to the list of cities where I reliably return.

From Italy I resumed my renaissance festival circuit, picking up in St Louis. I always feel very at home there, with this being my fifteenth year there as a musician, but it was a bit of an oddity; the festival is in the process of moving from the spring to the fall, and these two weekends were "preview" weekends offering a limited version of the show free to the public. Even so, I had a really positive experience, and the weekends were a rousing success.

I then spent a month performing at SCA camping events. It's typical for me to include a few of these throughout my year, as with Gulf Wars, but we were celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the Society's founding. This meant that I went from St Louis to a ten-day camping event outside Kansas City, and on to a week outside Indianapolis, with a few days visiting my parents before a long weekend at the War of the Trillium surrounded by my family of friends in Greater Toronto.

I then continued my Canadian adventures by spending July as a street performer at Byward Market in Ottawa, the nation's capital. I love Ottawa and, as is a theme in my travels, have a number of friends there. It's my favourite busking pitch in North America, as a historic neighbourhood meets a farmers market under the umbrella of a very helpful and organized management team.

I returned to the States, and to the SCA, for my annual trek to Pennsic, north of Pittsburg. My fifteenth year there, I'm starting to play for the children of people who started listening to me as children, themselves. I taught a class on neat medieval sites to visit in Italy, and I was honoured to co-teach a lesson on street performing with my old friejnd and dear colleague Jack Strauss, who calls himself Dr Henry Best in the Society. We have sharply different styles, and it was a lot of fun to see where our perspectives differed and lined up. I'm especially proud to be a part of this class because it has a history of encouraging artists to become professionals, with several alumni who have gone on to make some brilliant art.

I'm running out of creative ways to say "and then I went someplace else".

So off to the New York Renaissance Faire rode I! It's a truly beautiful show set in a former botanical garden, where I'm surrounded by (you guessed it) good friends, delightedly playing for New Yorkers who live in the live entertainment capital of the world and know how to be a phenomenal audience.

Sadly, the New York Faire overlaps with the new autumn dates of the St Louis Renaissance Festival, but I was able to return for the last two weekends of its season. As I mentioned, the preview weekends had gone off very well, and the full show was an even bigger deal.

After two weekends off, which I spent being a social butterfly in southern Ontario again, I headed south to Louisiana. This was my fourteenth year at the Louisiana Renaissance Festival, after a very difficult year for them. The site flooded in March, under 8 feet of water, and after they had cleaned it up did so again in September. I was deeply impressed at how many people pitched in their labour to make things work, and how well management pulled off the event after two such disasters. Thankfully the weather had gotten the water out of its system, because we only had one wet festival day the entire season for a remarkably good run.

In short, it's been a very good festival season for me. Outside of my live performances, however, I also got a lot more into Internet video this year. I launched a Patreon campaign and I'm very pleased both at its generous reception and with how much fun I'm having. I've been intending to take more video, and this has been a brilliant motivation to keep coming up with new variations. Many thanks to all of my patrons! And many thanks to everyone who has offered me encouragement, feedback, applause, and their business. Without you there could never be me, and I'm deeply thankful.