THE HOME STRETCH

Well, we have hit the stretch of tour where everyone is ready to get home.  This certainly isn’t unusual or a bad thing.  It’s not that we aren’t having lots of fun still; it just seems to be the natural cycle of tours.  When they start it’s always too much fun. Late nights and drunken shenanigans are most common when a tour starts because everyone is excited about leaving home and getting out on the road.  Then, after a while you settle into a routine and it becomes sort of mechanical.  There are still late night shenanigans, but they are usually milder and tend to be reserved for weekend shows.  This lasts until the final week of tour when everyone gets antsy.  We won’t be as friendly and talkative with people at shows; opting instead for more antisocial activities or at least ones that only include familiar faces.  This is especially the case with me right now, but I think that’s exacerbated by my current state of sickness and the frustration that can come with not speaking the language of the audience.  People start missing everyone back home and conversations in the van start more and more with “Man, when I get home I can’t wait to…..” 

Touring can be extremely isolating.  As anyone who has read this blog knows, tours are repetitive and boring.  Eating, sleeping, and riding in a car take up the vast majority of your time.  The only guaranteed interruption from the tedium is the 45-90 minutes that we get to be onstage.  You can only hope that cool people show up and that you get to have some interesting conversation, or that an opportunity for a cool new experience will present itself.  This does happen quite often, which is one of the many reasons I love touring.  I have gotten to do some cool shit in my life that many people only get to read about.  No one can take that away from me.  The problem is that so much goes on, and so much of it is hard to explain, that it becomes difficult to share these experiences with family and friends. 

Relating tour to others back home is hard to do, so when I am asked broad questions like “How was tour?” I almost always reply with “It was a lot of fun.” Or “It was really good.”  It almost seems like an answer you would get from someone trying to blow you off, right? The problem is that I don’t know where to start.  How do you sum up a month spent on another continent playing music?  I mean, I LOVE talking and specifically telling stories (especially over beer or coffee), but that takes a whole evening and even then you’re only getting tiny snippets of the larger picture.  Plus, I want to hear what I missed while I was gone.

The fact is that it’s often months of your life going by without the most important people in your life. No matter how hard you try, you can never relate that period as well as if it had been a shared experience.  This was a big problem for me and Jessica when we were together.  As I got to experience more and more, she slowly came to see it as something that she had been left out of and eventually it was a struggle for her to be happy for me.  I was trying to share my experiences with her the best I could, but she started to become less and less interested.  In her eyes I was living a life that she had no part in.  As time went on, this turned into bitterness and a rift that would help lead to our divorce. 

Thankfully, I have wonderful friends and family who have helped me out all these years in every way imaginable.  My parents and sister have been unbelievably supportive and have always seemed genuinely thrilled to hear about anything cool that I’ve gotten to see or do on the road. They are always interested in what progress the band is making or what recording session stuff I’ve worked on. The same goes for my friends really.  I’ve been fortunate enough to be surrounded by amazing people in my life.  They are the reason why I’m even writing this blog.  I figured it might help me describe such a unique experience to them.  It will be easier to elaborate in person at the kitchen table guzzling coffee the way that we Corbins love to do, but at the very least this has been my honest attempt at keeping them involved in my day to day life.  I don’t ever want to be regarded as an absentee son, brother, friend, or significant other again.

As for my list of stuff I want to do when I get back home, I personally can’t wait to see all my friends and spend at least one week night drinking with them at Big Boss.  Most of my friends are musicians so Mondays and Tuesdays seem to be the nights to get together since no one has gigs.  Of course, I want to see my family and have some of my mothers cooking.  I’m looking forward to tormenting their cats and watching some Food Network in the living room.  I want to go out drinking with my sister and be obnoxious enough to be an embarrassment to the family (we have this down to a science when we get together). This can be combined with getting ridiculous with Rachel Mills, followed by late night nachos at The Raleigh Times.  If Alternate George (George’s alter ego when inebriated) and Danny Johnson show up there will be a 3 am Cookout stop as well on the way home. The list of people I want to see is entirely too long to even list in all actuality. 

I can’t wait to sleep in my own bed or at least sleep in American hotel beds which are WAY bigger and better than the ones here in Europe.  The same goes for the showers. I’m looking forward to big, clean American showers with good soap, shampoo, AND conditioner.  I’d also like a haircut.  I can’t wait to do some cooking and get back on a healthy eating routine.  I can’t wait to get back into the gym.  These thirty days have been the longest break from exercise I’ve had in over three years and it’s slowly driving me insane.  I’ll have to make a conscience effort to not over do it my first week back and injure myself. 

I’m looking forward to practicing bass also.  This might sound weird, since I’m specifically over here to play bass, but on tour I don’t get to actually get in some good practice time.  I want to work on my fretless and upright chops.  The band has been throwing around ideas for a two week tour of small listening rooms and performing an all acoustic set, which I would really look forward to if it happens.  It would be nice for people to see us in another light and it would certainly keep things interesting for us. 

I realize that this post didn’t really inform anyone of the day to day activities of tour, but maybe it provides some insight to the internal aspects of touring.  Maybe I’m just homesick and needed to vent a little?  Either way I’m excited about the last few days of touring AND getting home.  One thing I’ve learned about being on the road is that this lifestyle will make you miserable if you lose the ability to appreciate both.