April 23, 2022 - Home

21 days, 19 shows, 26 states, and 8,800 miles later, the Teething Veils Canopy of Crimson tour is over, and we’re back home in Washington, DC, among our familiar homes, humans, and animals. We saw many old friends from past eras, and met people who were strangers and who felt familiar and became friends. We visited the crossroads where Robert Johnson made his deal with the devil circa 1930. We saw the birthplaces of Jimmie Rodgers, Elvis Presley, Emmylou Harris, and Buddy Holly. We saw the gravesites of Jimmie and Buddy. We saw the childhood home of Wanda Jackson. We saw the place where Lee Harvey Oswald extinguished the life of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. We played songs as old as 1999 and as recent as 2021. We told stories of living and dying, harm and healing. We played in a cave hundreds of feet beneath the Earth’s surface, on a ranch in the desert, in record shops, in a bookstore, in bars, at farmers markets, and at a party place for kids. We dressed wounds and applied heat to aching muscles. We experienced Gulf of Mexico humidity, Death Valley heat, North Dakota snow drifts, and bumpy Montana dirt backroads.

I haven’t experienced a tour where so many people picked up our records and shirts. It seems that people have grown an all-new sort of appreciation for live music, after two years without much of it at all. The 2013 Teething Velorio tour was made up of 17 shows, 20 days, 25 states, and 8,600 miles. The 2016 Teething Veils Constellations tour was made up of 8 shows, 11 days, 11 states, and roughly 3,000 miles. The latter is comparable to the most extensive tours with Silo Halo and The Antiques. While Canopy of Crimson is the most extensive out-of-town run of shows I’ve done to date, the mileage and mental wellness was only remotely possible because of the support and encouragement of my closest and dearest friends, and in particular my bandmate and traveling companion Hester Doyle. 

On coming home, I found two weakened bees inside the practice room. After moving them outside near the flowers, I remembered the first time that we played music in public after the pandemic hit. Our friend hosted us in her front yard in the spring of 2020. While we were loading in, she was called to attend to a bee hive found by a nearby family in their home (she’s a beekeeper). A few days later, I met with some friends, and came to learn that the family who found the hive was a family who I know. They had found the hive by the old bedroom of their son who had died of an overdose. We recalled how in ancient cultures, from Irish to Egyptian, bees symbolize the transition from this world into the afterlife. It struck me as curious that as I was singing these grief songs, our host was attending to the grief of these people who I know, unbeknownst to us. After three weeks of singing about departed loved ones to people in distant towns, both strange and familiar, finding those bees and bringing them back outside where they can thrive feels like a fitting punctuation.

The spongy moth of Indianapolis, Indiana

Road music (partial list): Joan Baez, Bikini Kill, Andrew Bird, David Bowie, The Byrds, Johnny Cash, Eddie Cochran, Dead Kennedys, Fats Domino, Bob Dylan, Steve Earle, Erin Frisby, Emmylou Harris, Kristin Hersh, Buddy Holly, Janis Ian, Wanda Jackson, The Jam, Robert Johnson, Little Richard, L7, Loretta Lynn, Metallica, New Christy Minstrels, Phil Ochs, Tom Petty, Elvis Presley, Public Enemy, Jimmie Rodgers, Shelter, Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, Gil Scott-Heron, Bridget St. John, Dusty Springfield, Norma Tanega, Testament, Townes Van Zandt, Suzanne Vega, Muddy Waters, We Are Hex, Hank Williams, Hank Williams III, Lucinda Williams, Warren Zevon