Vol. 91 - Married to the Road

On touring

A few weeks ago, one of my dear pals was in town playing a show with a new band he’s been touring with (and one you should check out ASAP. Seriously, I don’t often say this, but next time you look up, Billy Allen is going to be a superstar).

Like me, my buddy has put years in on the road. Unlike me, he did it for a while with one of the biggest rock bands around. But touring is touring, no matter how cushy it is; an exhausting life lived by modern-day pirates, people who wouldn’t really be adept at doing many other things beside playing their instruments night after night.

And now, like me, my buddy'’s got a little kid at home.

Before their set, he and I had dinner and caught up on each other’s lives, on the new tunes we love, and the strangeness of fatherhood. On the walk back to the club, we imagined what our futures might look like, how we could balance our lifelong dreams of playing music with our goals and ambitions of being good fathers. Those things aren’t mutually exclusive but doing both is really fucking hard.

We talked about how I was heading down to Athens, Georgia the following weekend to play a show with a band I’ve been playing with lately and how that band’s minimal workload suits my current lifestyle perfectly.

As we walked through a light rain, I told him what an ideal future as a guitar player looked like for me; perhaps a band who toured four or six or eight weeks out of the year; one successful enough that there would be a crowd every single night; one that paid me enough money to make my absence worth it.

But only in about a decade or more. Not now. Now, there’s not enough money or prestige in the world that could keep me on the road for the six or seven months out of the year I used to spend touring.

My kids need me here. More importantly, I want to be here for my kids.

In fact, that show I went to play last weekend, the one I wrote about in this very newsletter, was a bit heartbreaking for me.

Why?

Because I missed out on a lot. I missed out on my son’s first dance and his last basketball game of the season. I missed out on helping Emily with bedtime and bathtime. I missed out on dinners and bike rides and snuggles on the couch.

Laying in bed the night before the band left for Athens, I confessed to Emily how sad it was to be leaving for a weekend, how I didn’t want to miss a moment with my babies. She assured me that going out and playing my guitar was something I needed to do because going out and playing my guitar is written onto my DNA, and that doing as much—keeping a connection to those things I need to do—would help me be a better father. As usual, she was right.

Don’t get me wrong (especially you, Elizabeth, if you’re reading this… you should continue to hire me because I LOVE playing with your band), there are few things I’d rather be doing than playing my guitar with cool, interesting, and talented people.

But one of those “few things” is being at home with my family.

Of course, it’s easy to miss out on those nights at home a few nights a year, to go out for a show in Athens here or a show in St. Louis there. And maybe in a decade or so, when my kids need me less, I’ll find that band who tours four or six or eight weeks out of the year and scratch this itch that will never be fully scratched. But whenever I think wistfully about my former life as a guy who drove around America playing rock and roll shows for weeks and months at a time, I just have to remember this feeling I’m having now, deep in the pit of my stomach, that I don’t want to miss any of this.

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