I’ve been in one place for almost a week. Not home, but a place full of old stones I’ve given up trying to decipher. Slept in the same bed, worn clothes other than my black stage wear. None of it feels familiar, but it will, given time. It’s amazing how much time there is in a day when it doesn’t involve driving, flying, soundchecking, playing, packing up. I am paralysed by how much time there is. Even after the hectic last few months I still feel guilty for letting it slip away.
Adrenaline shreds the memory like a guilty accountant, so I kept a tour diary. Evidence. My own paper trail. I’m editing it now, trying to make sense of the stream-of-consciousness word-soup I spilled onto the page every day. It was part of my routine, to wake up and find somewhere to drink coffee and scribble a hurried five hundred words.
Reading it back so soon after finishing the tour is a bungee jump: I’m in the recent past, then not quite back in the present, on solid ground in neither.
I’ve kept a personal journal for almost forty years, but only as a record for me. The same instinct to preserve time that turned me into a songwriter. But I’m hoping I can turn this latest tour diary into something fit for your consumption. It’s more honest than I thought it would be, given that the job of the artist often involves disguise.
More and more these days, I’m trying to find ways to shed that disguise. All the things I once saw as armour, in the end become a barrier. And this tour has taught me—just as every previous has tour taught me—that playing music to a room of people is about finding ways to connect.
At fifty-five I’m still learning a lot about how to be on stage, and off it. I’m not sure I have the luxury of time to perfect either, but as I write this, I can see myself nervously pacing backstage, taking one last glance in the dressing room mirror, and telling myself it’s not about perfection, it’s about connection.
So if you were there, in any of those venues when we all sought that connection, let me thank you. We built those shows together. I tried to read the room each night to see if we were collectively up for the challenge. And every night we were.
There were times I admit, when I wanted you to feel uncomfortable. To feel the same vertigo I sometimes feel when the past comes rushing up through the songs and collides with the present. A lifetime burning in every moment. It’s fashionable to dismiss ageing musicians as pedlars of nostalgia—and it’s true I often heard myself singing the songs of a younger man, with a younger man’s heartbreak and angry concerns. But I don’t buy the nostalgia thing as a criticism. Coming from the Greek nostos and algos, what’s so bad about a longing for home?
On stage, night after night, that’s what I searched for.
Night after night, you helped me find it.
Tom McRae, November 28th, 2024
PS… there’s a new tour diary extract on substack here.
And I have new French shows now on sale for April 2025.
I would like to say so many things... that they wouldn't fit on paper. The words you write could be songs and your guitar would play the music... I can't attend your concerts, I live on a beautiful little island in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea (you can't come to my island to sing either, it wouldn't be profitable), I have been able to attend a couple of your concerts and in both I have enjoyed your songs enormously. Your music and your writings are fascinating. Thank you very much for all of that.
Having lost count of the number of your tours that I've seen, all I can say is that every one has been better than the one before. It was beautiful to be part of that connection with you this year, and I look forward to making it again soon.