15 tour moments ranked worst to best

I toured for 6 weeks & all I got was a renewed belief in humanity + a sick playlist

Me and heroic tour spouse Jude Brothers unloadin’ the Subaru. Photo: Adeliza Backus-Pace

1. Driving 90 mph through Iowa to thread the needle between 4 tornadoes on my way to get to a gig in Austin.

   Literally could not recommend that any less, I couldn’t stop to pee or eat for 5 hours and the stress gave me back pain for days, plus I think all that rough driving kinda busted my car? -200/10

2. Losing my voice and having to lay down on a couch crying instead of playing the really rad gig we’d booked with Ramona Martinez and Laurel Hells Ramblers in Roanoke.

   EXTREMELY sad, I could barely speak without hurting myself, my vocal folds felt like they’d turned into swim floaties someone jammed down my throat. I hate missing gigs, and I hate losing my voice — it turns the dial on my dysphoria and self-doubt all the way to 100. Un-fucking-pleasant. Also I was making myself watch “The Handmaid’s Tale” at the time because I was trying to understand its appeal, which of course made me feel worse because watching a show about clueless white women written by a clueless white man is a miserable experience. The only upside to this experience is that Liana’s dog laid on top of me the entire time. 1/10

3. A whole month of “tour squirts.”

   Listen, I’m an anxious guy. I get so anxious before every single show I play, regardless of audience size, venue, “importance,” etc. That means that I was squirting out diarrhea all day every day for 6 weeks. Is this too much information? Is this what the people mean when they say “vulnerability sells?” Is it even worse to admit that I see my tour squirts as a good luck omen? 1.5/10

4. All the times venues treated us like garbage.

   I’m not gonna name names here, because venues and bookers are all out here doing their best and I’m not interested in blacklisting anybody. Having said that, here’s to the venue that threw a temper tantrum in my emails and on social media because we couldn’t afford their $200 hiring fee and so declined their offered date with more than a month in advance; to the venues who never promoted us once, though they’d promised to, and omitted our names from their calendars; and to the venues who were flat-out misogynistic as hell. Y’all are somethin’ else. 2/10

5. Popping a flat tire in rural North Carolina.

   Tours are so goddamn precarious. All it takes is one flat tire, one oil problem, one busted transmission, and the whole thing is put to an unceremonious end. Thankfully, our flat happened on an off day. No one got hurt and a butch in Colorado taught me how to change my tires once so I was able to put on the spare. We also had enough service that we could locate a mechanic an hour away. A guy in a truck followed us for a while which made us panic, but in the end he just wanted to pull up and ask if we were okay. 3/10 because that guy is now my adoptive father. Also I looked powerful changing our tire. That’s gender, baby!

6. Canada.

   This was my first time playing in Canada, and it was… a rodeo. Why are there never bathrooms around?! Toronto was tough for us. Forget that Jude and I almost pissed our collective pants in a desperate, ill-fated search for a bathroom somewhere off the highway without a map or cell service. Technically we were playing a Toronto venue, but ended up kinda busking on the sidewalk in a major metropolis which felt brutal and also unexpected. Unexpected busking is only fun when you’re cis, whiskey drunk, or don’t need to make gas money. I’ll try Toronto again, but to be honest the best part was watching “Law and Order: SVU” at our cheap motel. Montreal was rad as hell but driving in that city was SO WILD! A friend told us it’s because y’all are snow people, and for most of the year there aren’t any lanes so everyone just kinda drives in a free-for-all? Harrowing. On the upside, playing a set for my friend I haven’t seen in years, then getting drunk on a back patio and singing Scottish folk ballads with iconic harpist/new friend Marie Hamilton, was pretty fuckin’ cool. 5/10

7. Playing music on a ferry in Maine.

   The Fox Islands are these teeny tiny islands off the coast of Maine where lobstermen and working class folks live at the edge of the sea, and where extremely rich people like George Bush come to summer. To get there, you take a ferry that runs only twice a day, and it takes about an hour and 40 minutes. There’s a cool venue there called Crabtree Sessions that invited us to play there and stay in a historic farmhouse. The whole experience was super wild, but it was especially cool to sit on the upper deck of the ferry inside thick, thick fog and play my 100-year old banjo to the terns diving into the water and the bladderwhack blackening sudden crags as Jude played their harp and our new friend Maya painted their nails. Downside: it was cold, and neither of us brought a jacket. Whoops. 7/10

   

   Hangin’ with the horses in Vermont on the maple farm, just before we dove into a pond filled with frog spawn. 10/10. Photo: Laurel

8. Unionizing talks with fellow workers

   When I’m not on tour, it can be easy to sink into despair thinking about what this world is like right now, and the dark legacies of how it’s always been. But being out on tour means I get to talk with other people in person, to connect about how we’re gonna take care of each other. Having conversations about unionizing in a bar in Cincinati with Sally and Molly of The Montvales felt really mobilizing, and labor history was a theme that kept coming up with fellow musicians and audience members alike as I made my way down east. I feel more hope than ever when I think of how we’re all looking around and asking big questions and trying to find new ways of divesting our attention and dependence from violent, warmongering, and predatory entities. 8/10

9. Queers moshing to “The Relic Song” in Boston.

   I’ve never liked Boston much — dating a Boston poet will do that to you — but watching a bunch of queers moshing while I played my song about the medieval Catholic relic trade fucking ruled. Y’all are so weird, Boston. It was fun enough that I might revise my opinion of the entire city. Maybe. 9/10

10. I played a set in New York City! I made it!

    The first time I visited New York City, I was 11 years old and I wanted to die. My home life was shit and it felt like I would feel bad forever, and I couldn’t really see myself making it to adulthood. So to stand on the Jalopy Theatre stage as a trans artist at age 35, looking out at a sold-out audience of 200 people, painting a mustache and playing music I wrote, was extremely fucking moving. Sometimes, when I’m playing music, it feels like I’m reaching back through time to take my own hand and show myself a portal of survival. This was one of those times. Literally the only downside was searching for food in Red Hook after 11pm, so shout out to buds Addie, Cass, Calil, and Lexa for making that bartender give us free frozen pizzas. 9.5/10

11. My fellow musicians, XOXO 4ever, I would die 4 U

    Here’s a playlist of a bunch of the folks we played with, stayed with, and jammed with over the course of the summer. Kind of can’t believe I get to regularly be in such incredible company. 10/10

12. Singing “Sycamore” with my cousin.

    I’m estranged from my family, with the exception of my siblings, and have been since 2018. I don’t often have cause for running into family members. But my cousin Justin, an incredible queer artist in his own right who lives in Portland, has always been a huge inspiration to me. When we announced our tour was going through Maine, he immediately DM’ed me. At a beautiful house show hosted by our friend Hamilton, we hung out and gossiped about our nightmare family and I learned that he’d estranged himself from our family, too. Later, during my set, I began singing “Sycamore” and suddenly realized someone was singing along with me. I looked over in the corner and there were Jude and my cousin, harmonizing softly. Doing my best not to cry, we all sang together to an audience that held its breath. It was a night of rare family connection, and brought with it a rare feeling of belonging I almost feel afraid to think of too often. 10/10

13. Getting midnight Taco Bell.

    This happened 3 times and each time it was spiritually important. 10/10

14. That epic show in a church basement in Little Rock.

    We came to Little Rock bedraggled and worn out, our penultimate show of the run. I had a panic attack in the car because suddenly I realized we might be around religious people who could be offended by me and my whole gig and I didn’t want to make anyone feel uncomfortable, I couldn’t bear the idea. But then I went inside and saw the AA Serenity Prayer and the Twelve Steps hanging on either side of the stage. Performing in a place where AA meetings happen is a real honor for me, as someone whose been through some of its sister program, ACA. They’re often places of both utter despair and utter hope. They’re often places of radical community. Anyone can be in places like that and be received. I felt my body relax.

    The room was packed to the gills with religious and non-religious folks alike, all of them so attentive and warm, and when I started into my spiel, everyone leaned in and something truly magical happened: together, we built a space of presence and attention. It was unlike any show I’ve ever played before. There in that church basement, full of priests and queers and musicians and Arkansans of all kinds, I shared stories and feelings I don’t normally let out into the public, and they were received with laughter, quiet tears, hope, and utter generosity. 10/10

15. Leaving home to come back home.

    This was the most rigorous tour I’ve ever been on. We covered more ground, more cities, and more time than I’ve ever covered before in my humble 3 years as a touring musician. At every turn, we were met with kindness, hospitality, and the kind of love I’m sometimes afraid to accept because it feels inexplicable. How can you still love me, after all this time, when I’ve turned into something different than what I was? How can you be so generous when you don’t know me at all? Sometimes trans folks came up to me after the shows and said they’d driven 40 minutes, an hour, sometimes 2 hours, just to come listen to my music. Sometimes, people I hadn’t seen in years showed up for me in ways I couldn’t believe, because they still cared about me. And then there’s my friendship with Jude. Touring with a friend can either snap a friendship in half, or give it real power. When my body failed me, Jude was right there to help me rest it; when my spirits sank, Jude was right there to pick me up again; when we were trapped in traffic desperately needing to take a piss, Jude was right there telling me jokes that made me laugh so hard a little pee came out.

    How do you accept friendship without fearing it’ll break? How do you accept admiration without fearing you don’t deserve it? How do you reach your hand to the hand that reaches, and trust that it won’t fall?

    Jude and I finished our run in Fayetteville, Arkansas, a place that feels increasingly like a second home to me. J had the brilliant idea of suggesting a dress code for this show — “cottage core kitty cats and rootin’ tootin’ rat kings” — so that Sunday night, something like 100 people filled the back patio of Buster’s in their best outfits and animal face paint, paying their hard-earned dollars just to be there. The annoying weird cover bar a few lots down was blasting club music, and the air was so still and hot that sweat ran in ropes down our backs, but somehow it didn’t really matter. We stood together, looking out at the faces of our friends and the faces of strangers. We sang together, our voices winding and twinning and splitting again for the last time, and together we sang for this home, for all the homes we’d made this month, and for the homes we are all, collectively, building together.

    Sometimes I think going on tour is the most drastic action of hope a musician can take. We know we won’t make hardly any money. We know it’ll destroy our bodies, our self-esteem, our cars, our bank accounts. It’s almost laughably futile: in a world where Spotify doesn’t pay 80% of its artists, where rent is on the rise, where debts crush us all under their heels, where the taxes we struggle to pay fund a genocide, where at any time we could catch COVID and suffer long-lasting health issues that affect our abilities to play music and rack up medical debt we don’t have the health insurance to cover… going on tour can seem like the stupidest thing an emerging artist without a team or familial wealth could do.

    And yet. And so! We go out, armed with the only tools we have, hoping and hoping and hoping. Hoping for ourselves. Hoping to change something in someone somewhere. Hoping to pass on our hope to the ones who need it.

    And you, facing so many of our same struggles, our same grief, pay the few dollars you have to come listen and feel something real. And you receive our hope. And you give us our hope back. And so it goes. In spite of everything, hope lives, makes a home of each of us.

    Long live tour. Long live home. Long live hope. If you were there, thank you. 10000000/10