Driving, Writing, Nursing and Performing Live Between Poland and Czech Republic…!

Hey,

I hope you’re doing well! I’m in room 210 in the legendary Inowroclaw Hotel Blast, it’s actually close to 16h (4pm) on Saturday afternoon. We arrived here late last night after flying from Montreal to Frankfurt and then driving 11 hours east to play at Ino-Rock Festival today! 

We all met at 9h this morning and left for the festival at 10h, where we then soundchecked at 11h30. We’re now back here for a quick pause from the rain and the cold before heading back for dinner at 17h15 (5:15pm). 

I really missed being on tour! So glad to be back at it, and I’m truly looking forward to tonight! Poland has always been so welcoming and generous to us! I really love it here!

The nursing part happened after I started writing down this text in the afternoon before our first festival show of the tour in Inowroclaw, Poland. It was during that concert that Alex jumped from the PA system and kinda hurt himself enough to not be able to walk at all the following day…! 

Another great chapter of the Life on the Road book which I’ll write down someday in the near future! :) 

In the meantime, I’m now writing from my Prague hotel room, as we just went on the other side of midnight after a whole day of driving more than 9 hours…!

🎧 What I’m listening to

Every time we’re on the road, Alex really takes huge pleasure in creating and updating his playlist on a regular basis. Every time he does that, it’s like a major thing happening, and he’s always quite eager to find out about our reactions! 

What he likes is to surprise everyone in the van with a song dedicated to someone in the touring party! Not many people are mixing Silver Mt. Zion with RZA, or Modest Mouse with Les Filles Illighadad, and why not Rimbaud and Pissed Jeans! Well… This is Alex’s vibes, always! 

Funny thing also for you to know is we can’t take a look at his playlist beforehand, we have to listen to it all together, and of course, share our thoughts and comments when we’re kinda surprised by an eyebrow-raising moment! 

Always great moments and memories coming out of Alex’s tour playlists!!!! 

Check it out here: Alex’s tour Playlist

📖 Reading highlight I’m pondering

As for those of you who have been part of this Club Missive for a little while now, you know that I have a yearly challenge on so many personal things, which I share in my last letter of the year a little before Christmas. Reading 5 books is part of a personal challenge, which can seem easy for some and really hard for others… Well, for me, it’s a real challenge! 

I just started my 4th book as the summer is ending, which means I’m not really ahead of time as we speak! But I brought a book Alex gave me on this tour called Goth - A History! Book written by Lol Tolhurst, co-founder of one of my long-time favorite band; The Cure! 

I started to read the book a few days ago and already, the Author’s Note already sucked me in from the very beginning...! 

It goes like this: 
Before Goth, there was anarchy and the mystery of anarchy begat Goth. What was the mystery of anarchy? Isn’t Goth just the mysterious part of a nihilistic rebellion called Punk? Or is Goth the true golden thread waving its way from the past until now and ever onwards to outsider infinity? 

What interests me is the why and the where for. The rest is mere detail. Last summer, I read this wonderful book called The Art of Darkness, where I truly discovered beauty, poetry and beautiful wonders in this dark way of seeing and embracing life called goth. For me, I was more on the punk side of things, but through this book, I truly realized how much goth and punk were walking hand in hand, which made so much sense to me, as I really like every band cited in that book! 

This book should fulfill this same melancholy longing...! 

🎧 Podcast I’ve Enjoyed The Most 

Rollingstone: John Fogerty on Creedence’s Origins and much more

I’m a massive CCR fan and have been for decades. I actually pretty much started playing music around that band when I was a teenager in high school…! John’s voice is, to me, linked to so many early days of playing music souvenirs, it always gives me shivers every time I hear him sing! What a voice! What a band! 

We had a conversation recently about that band after a rehearsal at the HQ. Alex was sharing with us how things in the band got ugly quickly after they got really famous, tragically, and things never changed afterwards, which, in my opinion, is even more tragic. 

A great listen!

📸 My Picture Of The Week 

Here’s my very first time in Prague…! So delighted and blessed to share it with you all! My first time of many many more to come as I really enjoyed and fell in love with this city! 

💬 Shared in the Long Shadows Chat this week 

Being in a band is the most amazing thing there is on earth! This hard-to-explain feeling of simply being part of a band is just priceless, it’s my identity, this is everything I live and stand for in some incredible sense...! 

But, as with everything else, it comes with loads of disappointment, and when I read this a few days ago, I thought there was no better way to describe how we should go through those emotions:

Disappointment
is inescapable but necessary; a misunderstood mercy and, when approached properly, an agency for transformation and the hidden, underground engine of trust and generosity in a human life. The attempt to create a life devoid of disappointment is the attempt to avoid the vulnerabilities that make the conversations of life real, moving, and life-like; it is the attempt to avoid our own necessary and merciful heartbreak. To be disappointed is to reassess our self and our inner world, and to be called to the larger foundational reality that lies beyond any false self we had only projected upon the outer world.

What we call disappointment may be just the first stage of our emancipation into the next greater pattern of existence. To be disappointed is to reappraise not only reality itself but our foundational relationship to the pattern of events, places and people that surround us, and which, until we were properly disappointed, we had misinterpreted and misunderstood; disappointment is the first, fruitful foundation of genuine heartbreak from which we risk ourselves in a marriage, in a work, in a friendship, or with life itself.

The measure of our courage is the measure of our willingness to embrace disappointment, to turn towards it rather than away; the understanding that every real conversation of life involves having our hearts broken somewhere along the way and that there is no sincere path we can follow where we will not be fully and immeasurably let down and brought to earth, where what initially looks like a betrayal eventually puts real ground under our feet.

The great question in disappointment is whether we allow it to bring us to ground, to a firmer sense of ourself, a surer sense of our world, and what is good and possible for us in that world, or whether we experience it only as a wound that makes us retreat from further participation.

Disappointment is a friend to transformation, a call to both accuracy and generosity in the assessment of our self and others, a test of sincerity and a catalyst of resilience. Disappointment is just the initial meeting with the frontier of an evolving life, an invitation to reality, which we expected to be one particular way and turns out to be another, often something more difficult, more overwhelming and strangely, in the end, more rewarding. -David Whyte

As you can see from the picture… I ended this text in Prague, two days after I started it! Life on the road for a DIY band is to take every opportunity you can to work, as you never know when the next time is, especially when you’re the driver! 

Let’s be great to one another!

Your chief operator and friend,
Jeff 

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