Tales From the Road

Sometimes I turn around and realize it’s been three months since I last posted on my blog. I have a very active social media presence between Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, each of which has its strengths, but I’ve missed the luxury of being able to more fully explore my thoughts.

As a traveling performer, I often repeat my schedule from year to year and therefore have a large number of friends I see only when I come to their area. We do keep up with each other via social media, which means that each of us has a grip on the key events of the other’s life, but it does drive home what I’m not posting online when I find myself repeating the same conversation to catch people up.

I pushed myself this year. It was a deliberate choice, and one where I weighed the risks fairly accurately, but I was definitely getting crispy in the fall. I didn’t burn out, thankfully, which happened in 2011, but I got closer than I’m comfortable with.

At the end of 2011 (which I still call “Black ‘11”) I was tired and questioning a lot about my life. I questioned my career choices, life choices, and even my continued existence in my first suicidal ideation since my twenties. In response, I made a few ground rules for myself that have served me very well in the meantime.

Some of them were creative choices that I’ve described elsewhere, a decision to prize artistic vision over potential commercial success, but some were very practical. My European tours that year had been overwhelming, and I decided to cap my busking tours at eight weeks. The intervening years have shown this to be a good rule, but this year I got ambitious. I was turning forty, after all.

I figured I had something to prove, and so I booked a three-month tour of Europe. It was fantastic, and I was very careful with my spoons, but it was still very tiring. Around week ten I realized that eight weeks was a good tour limit, but I wrapped up the tour on a high note and was looking forward to returning to Italy even as I left.

This is where I got careless. I landed Thursday night and I was at Pennsic Friday morning. Pennsic is a two-week immersively-medieval event in southwestern Pennsylvania, which I’ve been attending for over fifteen years. The quick turnaround hadn’t been my original plan, since I had intended to take a few days off, but someone in our group couldn’t fulfill their commitment to deal with the bureaucracy and I was the only person physically capable of stepping in (for SCAdians: we lost our Land Agent and I was only two hours away).

From there things started to cascade. As is my usual habit, I played music at Pennsic for the week before leaving to open the New York Renaissance Faire, returning to play again Monday through Friday and then back to New York for the second weekend. I’ve been doing this for years with little difficulty, but coming immediately on the heels of an already-overlong summer tour was a bit much. Looking at pictures taken of me that second weekend, I’m pretty confident I know what I’ll look like in ten years having seen such ravages of fatigue on my face.

I don’t regret any of my choices, and taking long breaks from music during the weeks between New York Faire weekends was deeply restorative, but it’s not a lesson I’m eager to repeat. I’ll try to keep that in mind as future birthday milestones parade toward me.

I'm a big believer in the power of luck. I've made many decisions over the years, creative and professional, but the biggest have often been leaps of opportunity. Last night I made another one.

I'm on a mailing list for bargain airfare, Scott's Cheap Flights, and when a winter/spring Europe sale was announced I jumped. I immediately scrapped my tentatively planned February southwestern US tour and brainstormed a southeastern Italy tour in its place. The cheapest airfare on the list was in Philadelphia, so I manically messaged a few friends inquiring about parking for the month and once I had a few viable options I booked the flight.

The whole process took almost exactly one hour, including the walk I took to clear my head.

This is me in a nutshell, making snap decisions to take advantage of opportunities. Also me, of course, will be seven months of second guessing until I'm in the seat of that plane, but I'm decisive in the moment. And this trip wasn't entirely out of the blue, it solves the conundrum I've been considering of how to return to the hottest part of Italy during the summers I have earmarked for European travel. Preparation meets opportunity and bam!

I'm not standing still I am lying in wait.

Honestly, I'm kind of boring. I wake up around 6:30, spend a while puttering around online and reading a lot of news analysis, and hop into the shower around eight. I putter some more, head out, have breakfast at a cafe, and play for a few hours. I grab groceries on my way home, eat a lunch of bread, fruit, and lunch meat and/or cheese. I take a nap, and have an afternoon walk. I play another few hours in the evening before eating the remainder of my bread, fruit, lunch meat and/or cheese for supper, and take an evening stroll before curling up with a book.

On my day off, when I'm neither playing nor traveling, replace the music with more walks and museums. I don't do much that's really interesting, but I'm deeply thankful that I get to enjoy my routine in some really, really cool places.

I do my best never to take anything for granted.

I refer to shows where I don't have contracts, even longstanding parts of my schedule, as "prospective" or "tentative". I'm very careful to label spreadsheet columns as "projections" rather than "expectations". And I'm literally religious about giving thanks when those formal hopes come to fruition.

I have a bit of a complex about the whole thing, if I'm honest with myself, and if I'm even more honest it's because I'm both leery of commitment and distrustful of expectation. I am the most optimistic cynic you will ever meet, and a proud Pollyanna. I fear, every day, that my business model will crumble even as I make plans for two years in the future.

So when people say, "I'll see you next year!" my response, unless I'm equivocal on the idea, is a firm "you will if I have anything to say about it!" I'm a fan of "see you down the road" as a goodbye. And so far it's served me well. For which I'm thankful, but make no assumptions about what may happen tomorrow.

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.

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 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.

I hadn't realized that backdated entries would go into everyone's feed as they have. I'm so sorry! From here on, I'll schedule daily updates ten years to the day after I made them, so they'll trickle in at a more reasonable rate. Again, my apologies!

It's funny, but I've been conceptualizing my return to Chile for so long that is hasn't felt real. Ever since I caught a bus out of Valparaiso in 2014 it has been my intention to return, and even buying a plane ticket didn't add much more than typical money anxiety.

But now I've got an itinerary and I've started booking housing. For some reason, the reality of the trip only starts to really come together in my mind once I've done all my googling for busking info, when I've read my guidebook and marked the places to go, and when I've looked at bus routes in order to map out a progression from city to city in a way that makes practical sense. So now I have it, and it feels like A Thing. I'll let you in on the details next week; I want to give my Patreon patrons a bit of a head start on the details since they're helping finance the trip.

Interestingly, the high-profile Macchu Pichu visit isn't really my focus. At a friend's prodding, for which I'm grateful, I've explored my options to get there beyond just putting the nearby city of Cuzco onto the appropriate part of my calendar, and I've asked my parents for a very luxurious Christmas/birthday present to bring the details together. Beyond that, I'm too busy focusing on January to really give my full attention yet to March.

Don't get me wrong, I expect to be floored by the ruins and I've heard legends from fellow travelers. Still, the busking side of things is what really gets my creative juices flowing, possibly because I unhealthfully define myself through my work. Regardless, I've worked through the first phase of anxiety (though I'm sure there will be others), and now I'm eager and ready!