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I have spent over thirty years around touring musicians while staying fairly planted in the Baltimore area, give or take the occasional vacation or “family obligation” trip.
My first encounters with friends returning from tour taught me: give them time.
They weren’t ready to be peppered with questions about it or to regale me with tales from the road. It was a big transition to return home, to their own bed. Here are a few things that have been passed on to me for those going through the transition.
To tour is to go against the human clock, set originally by the periods of light and darkness. We have altered these patterns ever since artificial light, but tour is an even bigger distortion. Hours of tedium and traveling to get one big adrenaline rush in the evening hours, then to try to come down from that and bed down somewhere… your circadian rhythm is getting clobbered.
Know that you are going through that transition and take conscious steps to reset your “body clock”. Some just continue to live by the rhythm of the road while off of it, but that assumes you have a job that allows for that. Speaking of…
At a certain level, tours aren’t profitable for the bands, breaking even at best, and the math has only gotten worse recently. Typically, a musician returns from tour broke and in need of working extra hours at the job that was flexible enough to let them go on tour in the first place. This makes the transition back even tougher. I have seen musicians going from headlining the show the night before to opening the coffee shop early the next morning, running on the adrenaline that sleep deprivation provides along with other things.
This is often where substances come into play, to help one get “down” enough to sleep and “up” enough to play the show or make it to work the next day. This can get very out of control or can be as simple as an extra shot of espresso. Still…
Alcohol dehydrates you. If you are a singer, both alcohol and caffeine impact your vocal cords in a negative way. Your body is around 60% water.
The more you are conscious of minimizing the damage on the road, the easier it might be to get back home and feel in a proper rhythm again. Some believe that the chemically-altered route is the only way to get though tour. In any case, it is not just your body that is going through it on the other end…
If tour goes well, there is mental downturn on the other side. Husker Du’s lacerating song “The Biggest Lie” gets into this, and the song was stuck in my head the weekend after the 2013 Maryland Film Festival.
I had the privilege of being featured as host in a documentary about the band Double Dagger. The weekend was filled with all kinds of moments of celebration and recognition of Maryland film and music culture, not to mention the surreal experience of seeing myself on the “big screen” for the first time. To go back to my workaday life after that weekend was a letdown.I understood it to be a small taste of what folks go through on the other side of tour.
If you are going through it during this “last show for a while” season, please know you are not alone. You went out and did something defiant, brave and bold. You took your music to others, risking flat tires, bad PA set-ups, and potentially hostile or indifferent crowds. Like Odysseus, you can’t just simply return home. Take care of yourself and give yourself time to adjust to life after tour.
