Our beloved tunes, in our beloved rooms
Like Twin Peaks and every 90s sitcom, I've made my grand return. I found a small notebook in my backpack with scribbled notes from last year- from fleeting moments from living on a tour bus to traveling through Yosemite all in broken, messy sentences. Somehow I hit a creative block or couldn't garner the self-confidence to write; which is unfortunate because now I'm only left with some Instagram posts and faint memories from the past 18 months. And possibly I'm starting to feel nostalgic. Or guilty. Or a mixture of both.
As I sit within the Ryman, I just think back on all the memories there. When I first came down from Chicago to see Mumford and Sons, the reason I moved to Nashville. St. Vincent. Dave Rawlings Machine, twice; the Decemberists, four times. George Ezra, Hozier, Lord Huron. Old Crow's celebration, ringing in the new year. Sufjan. Sturgill. Sitting alone in the room as the last bits of sun shined through the stained glass windows. And now here I am, awaiting the Punch Brothers, knowing it's going to be my last show.
How excited I was about Nashville, now faint in my memory: sipping jack and cokes on a rooftop downtown, munching on my first chicken and waffles, drunkenly holding hands with a boy at a karaoke bar, smelling the musty aroma of old records in Grimey's, meeting my neighbors who would eventually become my closest friends in the city. And now that excitement is gone. But does that change the development of the person I am or who I want to be? Or maybe it's been the most inspired years of my life. Even now, reflecting back on the past 4 years, I can't tell.
Will I stay in Nashville? Maybe. But where else could I go? Denver? SLC? Montana? Back to New York? Home to Ohio?
And I'm disappointed in myself that I never wrote about the events and experiences in the past year that got me to this point. Drinking gin and tonics behind a trash can in Raleigh, hiding out underneath El Capitan, drinking beer from a water bottle, sitting on a hot sidewalk in Miami with some of my best friends that I've met on my travels (also drinking).
But now in my most vulnerable and exciting time, it's time to move on to a new chapter. It's frustrating to a point that I don't what's going to happen next week, or next month, or next year. But for tonight, I'll enjoy this last show.
Guide us back to where we are from where we want to be