People ask what touring is like and they usually want one answer, and the honest answer is that all of it is true at the same time. It is a lot of fun. There is a lot of drinking. Sometimes the food is genuinely good and sometimes it is a petrol station sandwich eaten standing up in a car park, and you are grateful for both. You meet people constantly, the hosts who put you up and feed you, the fans who drove two hours to see a band nobody they know has heard of, the other bands on the bill who become friends for one night or for years. You see places you would never otherwise have any reason to go, small towns and big cities and the strange parts of countries that exist only as a name on a motorway sign until suddenly you have played there.
You are also tired almost all of the time. That is the part that does not make the photos. Touring is a slow accumulation of short nights, early load ins, long drives and the particular exhaustion of being switched on for an hour every evening and then unable to sleep afterwards because your body is still going. You get very good at what you do, because you are doing it every single night, and the playing becomes the easiest part of the day precisely because everything around it is so unpredictable.
And you are away from home for a long time. That is the cost nobody mentions when they tell you they envy your life. The same trip that gives you the best nights of your life also takes you away from everyone who is not in the van, for weeks at a stretch, again and again. You come home a slightly different person each time, a little better at your instrument, a little worse at sitting still, carrying a notebook full of names and a phone full of numbers of people you will probably never see again and a few you will.
I toured for the better part of a decade and I would do it again tomorrow, knees permitting. It is not glamorous and it is not miserable. It is the most concentrated version of being in a band that exists, all the joy and all the cost pressed into the same fortnight, and if you get the chance to do it properly you should, while you can, because there is nothing else quite like it and the window for it does not stay open forever.
Love,
Marten
