Twenty Shows in Thirty Days

This spring we played twenty shows in thirty days across eight states. Three of us, a borrowed van with a temperamental sliding door, two guitars, a keyboard held together with gaffer tape and a cooler that smelled faintly of pickles by the end of the second week. It was the longest run I have ever done, and the smallest in terms of budget. I came home tired, a little broke and happier than I have been in years.

Here is the diary, the good nights and the hard ones. I kept notes in a little spiral notebook on the dashboard, and most of what follows comes straight from those pages, cleaned up only enough to be readable.

The plan, such as it was

The idea started in January, when my friend Dana Reyes, who plays bass and drives better than anyone I know, said she had two months free and an uncle with a van he was not using. We mapped out a loop starting in Nashville, heading west through Arkansas and Oklahoma, down into Texas, back east through Louisiana and Mississippi, and up through Alabama and Georgia before landing home.

We booked most of the dates ourselves, by email, over about six weeks. Some venues said yes right away. Some never wrote back. A few said yes and then canceled, which is how we ended up with a surprise night off in Shreveport and a last-minute library show in a small town outside Jackson that turned out to be one of the best nights of the tour.

Our rules were simple:

• No more than five hours of driving on a show day.
• At least one real vegetable per person per day.
• Sell merch at every show, even if it felt awkward.
• Call home every other night.
• Never skip soundcheck, no matter how small the room.

We broke the vegetable rule more than once. We never broke the soundcheck rule.

The small rooms

Some of the best nights were in venues with forty seats. I did not expect that. On paper the big night of the tour was a 300-capacity club in Austin, and it was great, loud and sweaty with a crowd singing along to songs I did not realize they knew. But when I flip through my notebook, the nights I underlined were almost all tiny.

There was a coffee shop in Fayetteville where the espresso machine hissed through every quiet song until the owner unplugged it mid-set and got a round of applause. There was a bookstore in Oxford where people sat on the floor between the shelves. There was a converted church in Little Rock with forty folding chairs and an acoustic so warm I stepped away from the microphone for the last two songs and just sang into the room.

In a small room you can see every face. You know when a line lands. You know when you have lost someone, and you can win them back. It is terrifying and it is the best training a songwriter can get.

Every crowd teaches you a song differently.

Juno

One song in particular, a slow one called “Porch Light,” changed almost every night. In loud rooms I played it faster and leaned on the chorus. In quiet rooms I slowed it right down and the second verse became the heart of it. By the end of the tour it had settled into a version I like much more than the one on the record.

The long drives

We wrote two new songs between Memphis and Tulsa. That stretch is a little over six hours, which broke our five-hour rule, but it was a day off, so we allowed it. Dana drove, our drummer Theo Grant slept in the back and I sat in the passenger seat with a notebook on my knee and my phone recording everything.

The first song came from a sign we passed for a town I had never heard of. The second came from a long silence somewhere in eastern Oklahoma, when the sky got enormous and none of us said anything for almost an hour. Both songs are rough, but they are real, and I think one of them will end up on the next record.

Long drives are also where a band either becomes a family or falls apart. We had our moments, including one tense argument about whether the van’s radio should ever play anything other than old soul records, but mostly the miles made us closer. You learn how people take their coffee, which songs make them quiet and when to leave them alone.

The hard nights

Not every night was magic. In one Texas town, six people showed up, and two of them were the bartender’s parents. In another, the sound system failed halfway through the set and we finished fully unplugged while a television above the bar played a baseball game. We had a flat tire outside Hattiesburg at 1 a.m. and spent ninety minutes waiting for help under a single gas station light.

I also got sick in week three, just a cold, but enough that my voice went thin and scratchy for four shows. I rearranged the set, moved two songs down a key and leaned on Dana’s harmonies. Those nights taught me that the audience does not need you to be perfect. They need you to be present.

Key takeaway: the small, hard and unexpected nights are where you learn the most about your songs and yourself.

What I learned

Looking back, a few lessons stand out:

1. Book small rooms on purpose. They build the kind of fans who come back next year and bring a friend.
2. Say thank you out loud. To the sound person, the door person and the one person who drove an hour to be there.
3. Protect your voice. Sleep, water and tea are not optional on a long run.
4. Write on the road. New places, long silences and tired brains make strange, honest songs.
5. Keep a notebook. You will forget more than you think.

One more thing surprised me: how much the people along the way mattered. A motel owner in Arkansas who comped our second night when she heard we were a band. A sound engineer in Baton Rouge who stayed an extra hour to help us fix a buzzing cable. A family in Birmingham who fed us dinner after a show and sent us off with a bag of homegrown tomatoes. Small kindnesses add up on a long tour, and I wrote every one of their names in the notebook so I could thank them properly later.

Coming home

We pulled back into Nashville on a Sunday afternoon, unloaded the van and returned it to Dana’s uncle with a full tank and a thank-you card signed by all three of us. Then I slept for about fourteen hours.

Twenty shows in thirty days did not make us famous, and it did not make us rich. But it gave us new songs, new friends in eight states and a band that knows exactly how it works under pressure. If you came out to one of those shows, especially a small one, thank you. You are the reason I want to do it all again next spring.