#longread
A year removed, there is no more appropriate time to write this. We live our lives in a balance of thinking and doing. Bruce Lee style. Now I sit here in a hotel room in Germany on a cold-ass night in January, 2014. It’s getting late and jet lag is a bit of a bitch on this trip for some reason…so…I should go to bed. But somehow it’s time to think and put it out there for you. Long story short, 2013 was a monstrous, disastrous, unmitigated success. Everything that could go wrong did. And somehow it was perfect. It all worked. And here I am, again, on tour…with the same guys, no less! A feat for a hired gun–a troubadour–a wandering musician. This is the story of how 2013 ruined my life, and in the best possible way.
The drive to icy New York City from temperate Myrtle Beach in late January was marked every 15 minutes by a 1 degree drop in temperature, like a cab fare paid in comfort. We were off to meet a promising contact and PR agency, Erin Beck (Nichols and Beck PR) with plans for clothing sponsorships, makeovers, interview coaching, and a litany of tasks for our manager Matt Lukasiewicz, recently added to the team as a songwriter and manager. We settled for the single-room accommodations conceded by Nichols and Beck in an expensive city. Like the drinkers and flirts we are, we performed at a friend’s city apartment and drank all we could. We drank also on Erin Beck’s dime at a couple swanky bars, ate dinner she bought on her investor’s card, and lived like 7 cramped kings. Big leagues now baby. Talks of Sony deals with LA Reid and Burberry sponsorships. Even performed for an exec! But it started to crumble. We drank with them all after Erin went home…and the next day began with a tone. A call. A meeting. Burberry turned into Diesel which turned into $75 at H&M. The “contract” started to have changes. The promises weren’t adding up. In a word, we bought the talk but began to fight back. I remember the words “Absolutely not” coming out of my mouth as I realized this was Nigerian-Prince-Sending-Check-By-Email adjacent. I suspect to this day that there are a few personal reasons this didn’t work out, but as the tour continued, we realized that no PR was ever done, no advertising contacts were…uh…contacted, and no publicity was publicized. That hurt us later…
But we finally left for London as it began snowing back in NYC. Cold (again) and under the weather (from having shared a room with 6 other guys), we dragged our severely over-packed luggage through pricey London town. The help from Sara Brimer made it doable, but she took us as far as the Techtonics contact we had. A college group had agreed to house us amongst their members, and so we split up. An hour with a bike pump was simply not enough to fill the air mattress in the cramped room (surprise surprise). I somehow slept off what felt like a lead jacket. We made a short trip to Oxford to work with the Belles. A fun night in a sleepy town with a million secrets, we got to learn a few. Drinking. Flirting. SOP. The next days were spent at the London A Cappella Festival where again we flirted and drank. And slept in dressing rooms. The show was short and sweet but we were off-and-running for the tour. We also took an auditorium set after seeing some singing greats like The Swingle Singers and The King Singers. Flawless. Impressive. And we realized our power is in energy. It would be a bit presumptuous to say the least to compare our singing ability to theirs. So the next few months became acutely focused on heart. A heart that was being spent quickly dragging a yeoman’s share (appropriately through London) of albums we’d just pressed before departing, braving cold wet weather, spending more money than we meant to just to eat, realizing the lack of promotion done ahead of us, and perhaps most importantly understanding that a one-night-stand might be the only love to find on the road. So back to the drinking. And back to flirting–with a questionable end to limited means. Better get used to this and have some fun with it. Thank the heavens for our next stop…hot, beautiful Australia…an end and a means.