Hugh Moffatt: Lyrics, etc

Hi everyone-

This is a series of blogs I wrote from my tour in Europe with my sister Katy. Photos that go with each of these are on the Photo Gallery page.

Have fun!

-------- Hugh
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Notes From the Other Side
Hugh Moffatt
#1 - Michael Hils
Villingen, Germany, April 22, 2007

Micheal Hils left us a photo of himself at the hotel with his phone numbers. After my sister Katy and I got into our rooms, I called him and he walked the 250 meters from his apartment to meet us. Katy was not feeling well, so I went alone to have dinner with Michael. Things have changed for him.

***

Katy and I had spent the previous night with our agent, Joanna, at her home in Den Haag. It’s a busy time for her. My old friend David Olney, accompanied by guitar wizard Sergio Webb, had stayed the night before and was on his way out when we arrived about noon. We visited a little; caught up on the kids. David’s are younger than mine. When Mary and I fell in love in Nashville twenty years ago, focused on each other, we used David shamelessly, crashing at his apartment and pretty much ignoring him. Later, just married to Gina, he visited us in our first apartment after Corianna was born to discuss the possible loss of freedom for a musician having children. He had noticed that the people who told him it was a problem didn’t have children themselves, and all the people who had children were saying go for it. Of course he did.

David left about 1P to continue his tour. That evening Kimmie Rhodes returned from England with her husband and son to stay the night also. I met them just before I disappeared into the first sleep of jet lag. Kimmie is a long-time songwriter from West Texas. We have a lot of mutual friends, some now gone, but we had never met.

The next day Katy and I drove the 700+ kilometers from Den Haag in the Netherlands to Villingen on the edge of the Black Forest of Southern Germany. Distances driving in Europe are deceptive, and the time hard to predict. Through Germany there is no speed limit. The general cruising speed in the center lane of the large autobahns is around 140 km/hr with normal passing above 160. The top speeds are nuts. We saw a pair of Porsches rat racing through the traffic. They passed us like we were crawling. The authorities frown on this, and the consequences are severe if caught, but risk takers will take risks.

On the other hand, there is always road-work that slows traffic down to 80 or even 60 for lengthy stretches, and also the dreaded ‘Stau’, or traffic jam. There is no traffic jam anywhere in the US to compare with the German Stau for length, breadth and duration. I have seen a family cooking a meal out the back of their van during one. Fortunately, we encountered none and made the drive in less than 8 hours, including an hour’s worth of stops.

Our hotel is on the ring around the renaissance era wall around the medieval old city of Villingen. The first thing we saw as we creaked and straightened our way out of the hours in our Czech Skota station was a group of high school age boys on the tesselated pavement by the wall watching two of their number fighting seriously. Lots of yelling and a girl trying to make some statement on the sidelines.

Our first thought was West Side Story, or Central LA, but no. We Americans find it hard to think far enough back, but we finally realized it was Romeo and Juliet. This sort of thing has been going on a very long time. The only modern indication was the clothes and the cell phone one of them finally used to call the police.

***

Michael told me his story over dinner outside of a cafe in the center of the walled city. The 600-year-old wall is built right into the massive four-story apartment style houses surrounding the cobbled streets of the old town. It is in fact a huge fortress.

I knew Michael had lost his candy store and his house, obviously family issues, but I was not prepared for the tragedy he revealed. About ten years earlier, just a little after the last time I saw him, his mother had died. She had been a banker and accountant and had kept the books for his store, which was very successful. She was known to have money. When she died, Michael discovered the opposite. She was heavily in debt. To this day, he does not know where her money went. Under German law, he had the right to refuse the debt, but he chose not to and began making payments to the bank. His mistake, as he admits, was not to tell his family. He did not want to burden them with the truth, as he puts it. I can’t help but believe he was also ashamed.

He was able to pull this off for four years. Then major construction started across the street from his store and blocked off his street access. His business dropped by 70%. He held out for year before discovering there would be another year - or more - of construction. He closed his doors to business and told his family his situation. He had to sell his very nice house. His wife was devastated, not all because of their loss, but because of his deception. They have lived separately since then though not divorced. She is becoming reconciled, and there is a good chance they will return together.

Michael is the same wonderful person. He lives in a self-renovated apartment in the old city and works part time for the curator of the Villingen art gallery. He has taken up the bass and plays in a bluegrass band called The Hils Angels with some of the finest musicians in Europe.

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Notes From the Other Side
Hugh Moffatt
#2 – Villingen Folk Club
Villingen, Germany, April 23, 2007

Last night we officially kicked off the tour. My Katy and I had not performed together for four years. She lives in California, and I live in Washington State. We practiced some at my home in Pullman when she visited at Christmas, then practiced separately leading up to traveling to Europe. Finally, we ran through everything at Joanna’s house in Holland the day we arrived. We knew there would be some rough spots in the first show, but we figured we could pull it off and things would roll OK after that.

At 8:30, before we went on stage at the Villingen Folk Club, Katy warned me that she was having some bowel disturbance and should she suddenly introduce me to do a solo song and leave the stage, I was not to worry, she just needed a ladies room urgently. I replied lightly that whatever went wrong, it was unlikely to be something that had ever happened before, so she shouldn’t worry. I really wish I hadn’t said that.

We walked together onto the stage to friendly applause. I first played Villingen in 1988 with a trio from Nashville and with Mary and 5-month-old Corianna along. I have returned several times, but not since 1995. I greeted some old friends in the front of the house before the show. It was something of a reunion. The audience was small, warm, and a little reserved…at least at the beginning.

Katy and I spoke a few words into our mics, then I touched a few guitar strings with my finger pick to test the level and discovered that one half of my guitar wasn’t working. My guitar is a fifteen-year-old black Alveraz acoustic-electric with a very sweet pickup system. It has two battery powered contacts built into the bridge that separate the three low strings and three high strings into two outputs that can be used separately in stereo or sent to the mixing board as a single mono signal, which is most common, and what we were doing this night---except the three high strings were dead as a doornail in the sound system.

We had done a really long sound check…about an hour and a half…because we needed to get used to playing together again and hearing ourselves in the monitors. The guitar had worked fine throughout that. Maybe the guitar had stage fright, because there we were in front of a live audience, many of whom had been waiting for me to return for twelve years, and I was suddenly playing a three-string guitar.

We plowed ahead, Katy and I having a similar thought: it must be the battery. The first three songs in our set were fully unison two-guitar powered, and adding Katy’s six strings to my three, the deficit was only 25% of the total strings missing. More importantly, for the fourth and fifth songs, we had scheduled two solo songs by Katy. Looking ahead to that moment, Erbse, the sound engineer, placed a 9V battery on the stage in front of me.

After song number three I left the stage and disappeared back stage, where I frantically loosened all the strings, removed my pre-amp battery through the sound hole of my guitar, and replaced it with the new battery. Re-tuning the guitar through my electronic tuner, the pickup seemed to be doing fine. Apparently, however, the important variable was not the battery, but the live audience. Songs number six and seven were performed with the now familiar Moffatt Family Nine-String guitar sound.

Next came my solo section. Katy lent me her guitar, and that went OK. Throughout the rest of the first set we were making decisions on the fly about when I needed to play her guitar and when the nine-string option was passable, making sure none of the songs depended on fully independent guitar work by both of us.

Of course we were maintaining a show all this time…one we hadn’t performed for four years.

During our break, the resourceful Erbse pointed out that since I had two outputs on the guitar, perhaps we could solve the problem by using two guitar chords, taking the signal out of the guitar in stereo, and mixing it to mono on the board instead of in the guitar. Brilliant! Except, again, for the effect of the audience on my guitar’s emotional state.

Set two actually outdid set one. My high strings were no longer totally gone, but produced something like a zombie sound effect: a strange living dead distortion that came and went haphazardly like a nervous Banshee when ever I played them. The bluegrass solo I attempted was particularly interesting.

To our audiences, Katy and I are 90% songwriters and singers and only about 10% guitar players, so the math actually worked out to more like a 2.5% to 5% deficit overall, depending on how you score the zombies, and, oh yes, the time I slung my guitar behind my back Johnny Cash style to sing a harmony, and the guitar strap slipped completely off its knob crashing the guitar to the stage behind me with full electronic amplification. No problem with the pickup there.

Funny thing was, that seemed to shake up the zombies. The guitar behaved fine for the next song and a half until they came to...this time with more resilience. They were not fazed at all when I made a dramatic stage movement and smashed the head of my guitar into my microphone. None of this went unnoticed by our audience, which had loosened up considerably.

As I had predicted, Katy had no lower GI emergency and performed beautifully. We got two encores, not entirely out of sympathy, and the evening ended.

This afternoon I took my guitar to Erbse’s shop to see if we could fix it. Of course there was nothing to fix. There being no audience around, it worked perfectly. Or maybe it was just daylight and the zombies were asleep, no…wait…that’s vampires.

Trust is gone now. As someone once said, any problem that goes away by itself tends to come back by itself.

Tomorrow I will take my guitar to the guitar-shop-slash-exorcist in Shaffhausen and leave it until all is peaceful and right again. I may visit it in its asylum when I return in another 12 years.

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Notes From the Other Side
Hugh Moffatt
#3 – Feuerthalen, Dolder 2, and Rheinau, Stadthalle
April 27, 2007

As Katy and I pulled away from the Dolder 2 yesterday about noon, we watched Tom Luley, the owner, run barefoot across the highway towards the Rhein dressed only in a red swimming brief. With his brown hair hanging to the middle of his back, he looked like a slighter version of Tarzan. Katy drove across the bridge into Shaffhausen, and I looked back in time to see him splash into the water.

Tom is hard working, well organized and fun to be with. A few minutes before, he had given us each a little aluminum foil albatross that he makes for all guests. They are taped to the dashboard of our car now: one silver, one gold. I told Katy she ought to marry Tom. Selfish on my part. I just want him in our family.

We had driven to Shaffhausen the day before, a day early, because a busload of French elementary school children had descended on our hotel in Villingen and we needed to escape. The kids were wild and cute, the teachers loud and frantic. They were on a weeklong school field trip to Germany. Katy and I were impressed. We imagined a busload of elementary kids from Texas, where we grew up, taking a weeklong trip to Mexico...um…no, I think not.

Richard Dobson and Edith Brunold met us at the Gasthaus that Tom had arranged for us and led us to the guitar shop, where I left my haunted guitar. Then we went to their home in nearby Diessenhofen for the rest of the day. Richard is an old friend from Nashville, also a Texan, and a wonderful songwriter. He and Edith have been living together in Diessenhofen for almost 8 years now. He tours regularly in Europe and about once a year in the U.S. Edith used to promote shows in Switzerland around Zurich and Shaffhausen. I had worked for her two or three times in the past. Now she has an EBay business selling collectible videos, though that is disappearing due to the growth of digital downloading.

The excuse for the visit, as if we needed one, was that Richard wanted to do an interview with us for possible publication in an American music magazine. He had great questions for both of us. Among other things, he challenged me perceptively on the themes of my newest CD, “Songs From the Back of the Church”.

That done, we continued the conversation we had started in 1973 along with David Olney and others when we all first met, and which will outlive us all. Conversations among writers are like bread yeast starter. Somebody starts it, then it spreads and grows as it is shared with others. Regularly bits are taken out and used in a song, or a story, or a newsletter like this, or maybe a novel or opera, but there’s always plenty left to keep going and growing. As we were saying goodbye the next evening, Edith told me how glad she was that Richard occasionally had someone to really speak English with. The truth is, as I told her, he wouldn’t find this particular conversation many places in the U.S. either.

We don’t spend much time on the old days, because there is so much new to talk about. Richard has finished the fourth draft of a new book. This time he is investigating his experience settled in a foreign country, where he still doesn’t really speak the language. He told me he had always imagined himself ending up outside the U.S., but in a Spanish speaking country. He is fluent in that language. Instead the community around him doesn’t usually even speak German, but the local variety of ‘Switzerduts’, Swiss German, which is a group of provincial languages older than the official Hochdeutsch or “high” German. Life is strange that way.

The new book has gone as far as he can take it without an editor. He’s temporarily stumped on that. Probably he will not approach professional publishers, but pay an editor directly to help him finish it and then publish the book himself. With the computer technology today, this is a real option. This is his fourth book, and will be the second one published.

My part of the conversation had mostly to do with my efforts to perform “Songs From the Back of the Church” more and how my experience as a middle manager in an aggressively growing company has challenged and rewarded me and enriched my understanding of myself and others. It’s all grist for the mill.

The next morning Katy and I shopped a little in town and picked up my guitar. Franz, the shop owner, had found that the battery contact was loose and replaced it. No zombies after all. We played that night at Tom’s club in Feuerthalen, a sub-city of Shaffhausen, to an audience packed from corner to corner of the room and spilling out the doors. Tom came up near the end and played harmonica when Katy did “Mr. Banker”. It was all fantastic. Richard and Edith were there, and Franz, and others from as far away as Zurich, many known to us from previous trips. We stayed there visiting until too late.

The presence of the family Zolle was particularly significant to me. The daughter, Michelle, is now in her mid twenties. When I first came to Switzerland in 1988, her parents had taken my first CD home with them, and she fell in love with the music at the age of 10 or 11. She wrote me a letter in English, so I wrote back in German. Neither of us could say much in the other’s language, but we kept writing for a few years. I hadn’t seen any of them in a long time.

It was a shock to see Michelle a grown woman. It’s different with my own children: sort of like a frog getting boiled to death without feeling it because the water temperature is rising slowly? With other people’s children, I’m thrown straight into the boiling pot, and it hurts!

The next show in Rheinau was in the lobby of their brand new town concert hall. It isn’t even on their postcard aerial photo yet. I had to draw it in before I sent the card to Mary. They set the lobby up like a French street café with tables and a bar. The walls were all glass on three sides and the ceiling about three stories high. It went great again, though different. I’m now convinced my guitar is healed, and that Katy and I can actually do this. That’s all good.

We’ve now finished the first week. We’ve survived. We’re comfortable with the show. We’ll see what lies around the bend, but Tom and the Dolder 2 will be hard to beat.

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Notes From the Other Side
Hugh Moffatt
#4 – Friends and Characters
May 3, 2007

I’m in Harpel in the far north of the Netherlands. You won’t find it on any map. The closest town that appears is Vlagtwedde, right next to the German border way east of Groningen. Katy and I play this evening in the living room of the house of my hosts, Maarten and Liz. There will be about 30 people.

Their home is new, unfinished, and also houses two small children, Salome and Rowan; a large dog, Shaq; and a cat named Oy (from Stephen King’s Dark Tower series). Liz is the daughter of my old friend Rienk Janssen, who has a mail order music store called Strictly Country Records that specializes in American country and Americana artists. Rienk has been doing this for a very long time, but only recently full time. He retired from thirty years of teaching school only a few years ago. He told me, if they haven’t learned by now….

The new house stands on the ground of the old farmhouse where I played several times in the 90’s, and which burned down in 2001, taking the life of Liz’s mother, Joke (pronounced like Yoda with a ‘k’), who used to host the concerts. Now Maarten and Liz have small house concerts in their living room surrounded by the neat, flat, Dutch farmland and the spirit of Joke.

The whirlwind of the last few days has left me with a mix of images of people I’ve met: old friends, new acquaintances, and just plain characters. Starting tonight, we have seven shows in seven days then I fly home, and Katy flies to Scotland to start a three week solo tour in the UK.

I should explain a little about American country music outside of the U.S. Country music traveled to Europe (and elsewhere in the world, most importantly Japan and Australia) with the American soldiers in World War II. It took root in a way that is astounding. In Germany, for example, there are German country artists who have gold records singing original country songs---in German.

Australian native Keith Urban didn’t happen in a vacuum. There are many great European, Japanese, Australian and other musicians performing American country and bluegrass music all around the world.

As with any art form that travels to a different culture, many versions appear, some of which seem bizarre compared to the original. At the large country festivals in Europe, you will see normal citizens drive up in their Mercedes or BMW, go behind a curtain carrying a duffel bag, and reappear looking like Hopalong Cassidy, complete with pearl handled revolvers. It’s quite a shock to see a tent full of these “cowboys” with huge steins of beer to go with their sidearms. In Texas, there might be a few less people alive at the end of the night. Here, it’s no problem.

The village of Koetz, near Ulm in Bavaria, is home to one of the warmest and most sincere groups of country music fans anywhere in the world. They call themselves “The Country Friends Koetz” and are now 25 years old as an organization. I have worked for them a half a dozen times over the years, Katy also. They promoted our Langenau show this time. People drove from as far away as Stuttgart and Munich to see us. Some of them dress in leather and big hats, some in bright western style shirts, most just dress normally, but they all love the music and show it.

Johnny Yuma showed up in Langanau, which threw me. I’m big on context for remembering people, so it took me a few minutes to place him. I first met Johnny in Munich at least 15 years ago at the Rattlesnake Saloon, a very rugged looking place run by very rugged looking people who are actually big softies. The proprietor is Bruno Theil from Romania, who speaks English exactly like Bela Lugosi in Dracula. He lives in a wheel chair because of a motorcycle accident many years ago. His cook looks like Keith Richards, dresses like a Hell’s Angel, and cooks like a French chef (reference Lino, below).

Johnny named himself after the Johnny Cash song from the old TV show with Nick Adams. He dresses in Hollywood cowboy fashion---not Roy Rogers Hollywood, but more gritty---sometimes Bat Masterson style with a bowler hat, sometimes Boxcar Willy style, with a train conductor’s cap. After our show he sang a song for me that he had written about the first time he saw me perform. He remembers that there were only seven people in the audience. It impressed him, so he romantized the event and made me a role model. The song is about wanting to just keep singing, no matter who is listening. It touched me very much.

After Langenau, we drove through Austria back to Switzerland to the village of Obstalden high on a mountainside above the Walensee north of Chur. Across from our hotel was the tallest waterfall in Switzerland, a small volume cascade that seemed to take minutes to make it from its top to the surface of the lake.

Every time I go to Eastern Switzerland, I feel like I’m coming home. I don’t know why that is. The Alps are stunningly beautiful, but it’s not that. There’s some connection I don’t understand.

Another old friend, Paul Rostetter, promoted the show in Obstalden. He is about six foot three with beard and hair two feet long and was a Swiss banker when I first met him. Alice and their son, Michael, came to dinner with us. Michael is sixteen now and into heavier music than Katy and I do, so he didn’t stay. I remembered an earlier time driving with Paul and Alice through Northern Italy and having to stop a few times so Alice could throw up because she was pregnant with Michael. I didn’t bring that up while Michael was there. Experience as a parent.

On Monday Katy and I drove to Aarau between Zurich and Basel. The Swiss portrait and landscape photographer, Werner Rolli, had contacted us knowing we had a day off, and asked if he could photograph us. We agreed enthusiastically. We are always in need of new photos for promotional purposes, and it is often expensive and always difficult to schedule.

We spent about three hours in Werner’s studio, then had dinner with Werner and Elizabeth and their two grown daughters. It’s a new friendship, and the photos are dramatic and very good.

The next day was Tuesday. In a section of the town of Volketswil, a little south of Zurich, we played in a stable-like room that was packed and overflowing outside. Before the show, the promoter had arranged a barbecue for the audience. Lino, a young chef who lives with his parents in the home attached to the venue, prepared the barbecue.

Lino, not more than thirty years old, has been cooking for 15 years. He’s very good at it. I asked him what cuisine was his favorite to prepare. French, he said. He is currently making a sacrifice by working for a chain of vegetarian restaurants in Switzerland. He considers it an excellent career move, but I understand what he means by sacrifice. I was at dinner once in Strassbourg in France with a party of seventeen or eighteen people. At one point I looked up and down the table and realized you could have assembled an entire cow from what was on the plates around me. No vegetarians there.

Lino asked me if I liked Switzerland. I said, yes, very much. He asked me why. Is it because everything is so neat and clean? Not really, but I had to think about this. I really wanted to understand it myself.

The Swiss are very internationally aware. I like that. Lino told me his kitchen staff currently has two refugees from the former Yugoslavia (whom he is certain would try to kill each other if they met on the street) and two others from African countries.

Finally, though, I told him it’s because the Swiss seem to care a lot about doing things right and doing them well. And they appreciate it when others do things well, too. That’s important to me. Roger Federer, the magical tennis player, is Swiss. I read once that he trained by watching every style of player there was and developing a shot to counter each shot he saw any tennis player make. The commitment and attention to detail that it takes to develop those skills is very Swiss. Also of some significance for those of us at SEL is the fact that Schweitzer means “Swiss” in German.

I miss Mary. I’m ready to get back.

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Notes From the Other Side
Hugh Moffatt
#5 – Katy
May 5, 2007

In Harpel, Katy began her solo section of our show by singing “Playin’ Fool”, the title song of her brand new album, which she had just gotten that day. I sat in the audience and listened and watched. Katy throws herself into her perfomances. Her voice is remarkable. She is one of the all time great ballad singers, but most people are initially attracted (or occasionally put off) by her total physical involvement in what she is doing.

She’s small and full of an energy that can possess her rather than come from her. This manifests physically during her uptempo songs in body and vocal movements that are unexpected and not entirely comfortable to experience. She seems on the edge. When she is on, she is genuinely a great performer. She is rarely off.

She writes complex songs of her experiences and sometimes of historical or literary figures. The words are strung on soaring melodies that allow her voice to fly. She sings a lot of my songs also.

We talk these days about how we are like our parents in one way or another. It’s easy to see. As we both grow older, we are noticing mannerisms and physical resemblances to one or the other of our parents from ages that we remember them the best. But Katy is mostly an original.

She is endlessly cheerful, no matter what is happening. She has some very difficult physical issues, and traveling is a challenge, but she carries it lightly and goes on. As her brother I’ve seen her just plain pissed off, but not often. I’ll bet few others have at all. She is a joy to be around and a challenge for me, because I’m more moody.

Her cheerful nature and her complete creation of herself around her music is different from anything in our parents. They loved music but were not musical themselves. In their prime, Daddy was very sweet, and could loosen up at parties (which he loved), but was also something of a quiet sourpuss. Mamma, a Texas blunderbuss of a woman, rolled over complex personal issues like a tank through barbed wire…upbeat and positive, but no one would use so gentle a term as cheerful to describe her. Though both had exciting and successful careers, they were more focused on friends, family, and each other than on their work. At least as we experienced them.

Katy lives for performing and it enlivens her.

We have a wonderful time on stage. It’s fun to talk to audiences together and people really like it. I guess there are things that come from our deep relationship that audiences pick up on, and that we…at least I…am not really aware of. I know something like this is true, because people in our audiences have told me.

It’s also fun to travel together. On this trip, Katy has done most of the driving and I have been the navigator. We have directions for each day’s trip from Joanna, and we have a lot of maps that Katy has acquired. Navigating in Europe is an interpretive process. Following a certain road or going “straight on” can be a challenge, because the roads just don’t go straight on for very long. The experienced local knows that when Road A turns left to join Road B and then leaves it a kilometer later to become Road A again, that it’s all a part of “straight on” and not worth mentioning. Neither are the other roads continually leaving or joining along the way that look exactly the same but are “obviously” not the right ones.

Road names and route numbers help sometimes, but you run into myriad alternate routes with the same number, roads that change name every few kilometers, and occasionally roads that are named one thing on one side and something else on the other. Of course you’re only supposed to count the “correct” name. Also, any village road that goes towards the next village is named after the village it goes to. That’s not hard to understand, we do that in the U.S. But when there is one major village surrounded closely by a half dozen minor villages, each one of those minor villages will have its main street named the same, i.e. after the major village.

In Switzerland we spent a half an hour looking for a hotel at #7 Usterstrasse, finally discovering that our #7 Usterstrasse was in another town 15 km away on the other side of the ubiquitous Uster. Last night we followed very complex hotel directions into a suburb of Brussels at rush hour, making instinctive moment to moment decisions, grasping at straws of evidence as the street signs and landmarks floated by, and got totally lost. We called the promoter on his cell phone to find that we had driven past the hotel, looked straight at it, and not recognized it. Probably we just didn’t believe we could really find it.

Katy seems to actually enjoy all this, and so…I do, too. It’s a wonderful gift. She says that everytime she goes to Europe (usually by herself) and studies the intinerary ahead of time, she feels it’s hopeless---she’ll never be able to do it. She always does. It’s now an article of faith. Somehow the hotel will appear, once you have completed the necessary trials.

Last night at our show in Brussels, I listened to Katy sing the beautiful ballad by Cindy Walker, “You Don’t Know Me”. There is no musical experience more deeply complete than the match of that song and Katy Moffatt. But for those watching and listening in that moment, the song title is just wrong. Katy is there, open, for everyone to know.

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Notes From the Other Side
Hugh Moffatt
#6 – From Bree to the end
May 10, 2007


We left Brussels about 12:15 on Saturday to make the short drive to Bree. We are now into the serious part of the schedule. Starting with Harpel on Thursday, there are seven shows in seven days. We’d done six in the first two weeks.

This had worried me from the beginning. Years ago, an agent booked me for ten shows in a row in Germany, Switzerland and Austria. Every one of them was a smoke filled room, and I was singing the whole show by myself. I developed an inflammation of my vocal chords that took about six months to heal. At one point I didn’t speak for three days. For a working singer, that’s about as scary as it gets.

There are things you learn to do to protect your voice---ways to sing, ways to talk---but my voice has never been as resilient as it was before that experience, and I have not sung more than four days in a week since. The only reasons I had agreed to this schedule were because it’s a duet show, so I don’t have to do all the singing, and because I wanted to test myself to see how it would go. I was about to find out.

***

We had already been to the area of Bree the previous day. The promoter, Jan Schonkeren, sent us a message via Joanna asking us to do a live regional TV show to help promote the show. So on the way from Harpel to Brussels, we make a detour to Hasselt, the main city in Belgian Limburg where Bree is located. Of course this is the day we hit traffic. A drive of 400 km should take about three and a half hours. We allow four and a half, and it takes five.

We are due to arrive at 3:45 and go on about 4:30. At 3:05 I call the studio to tell them we are still an hour away. They say not to worry, the show goes until 5. They’ll get us on.

We arrive at 4:10. Jan meets us on the street and guides us into the parking lot of a large building. We grab guitars and dash. In fifteen minutes we are dressed and waiting in the wings, while a local author live on the soundstage in front of us talks about his new book (a photographic study of Limburg from the air). The technical people are great, but they don’t have enough microphones. They give Katy a microphone on a stand and me a headset like Garth Brooks uses. I feel pretty cool.

During a break, they lead us onto the set, tell us which cameras they will use, and the host greets us. This is about 25 minutes after our arrival.

Performing on live TV can be disconcerting. Everything is done for the TV audience. Basically, if it can’t be seen or heard at home, anything goes. The on-air people are dressed for the stage: in make up, calm and confident. The back of the set that the camera sees is neat, bright, and professional. The rest of the set looks a little like a teenager’s bedroom with lots of people running around trying to make it all appear seamless, which it most definitely isn’t. I sometimes wonder if this is what God and the angels do for us. Could this be what it’s like backstage in heaven?

All this makes it hard to focus on performing. Katy and I agree on a spot to use to perform to. We have decided not to look into the camera but treat it like one member of a larger audience. This is a good idea when you haven’t had a lot of time to prepare. We do our sound check, get a thumbs up, and wait for the station break to finish.

About 30 seconds before we start, we are told they’re going to use different cameras. We are repositioned in a way that I can’t see Katy and she can’t hear me (!!!!). The countdown starts. I quickly pick a new focus point and communicate this to Katy. (It looks really silly to see two people on TV singing together in slightly different directions.) The host introduces us, and we begin our song.

No one runs behind the cameras, so it’s pretty smooth. We end together, which was by no means certain, and then sit down with the host. He translates everything into Flemish as we talk. Of course he condenses. If our answer takes 30 or 40 seconds as we carefully address the deeper aspects and relevancies of the question, his translation only takes about ten. I suppose it could be that the Belgian language is so subtle and powerful that it’s really three or four times more efficient than English for expressing complex thoughts, but…probably not.

Jan tells us it went fine. We change back to road clothes and head off to have a quick dinner and drive on to Brussels for that evening’s show, a lot of energy expended, but feeling successful.

***

We performed in Bree in the Brueghelzaal, the town concert hall, for about 100 people. There are many old friends. One longtime fan, whom I remembered but didn’t know well, had died suddenly just three weeks before. He had been one of the first to purchase tickets to our show when it was first announced, and his family came to the concert. His son-in-law told me that one of my songs had been played at the memorial and gave me a picture of him. During the show I kept the picture on the table next to me, said what I thought was appropriate, and dedicated two songs to his memory. I can only hope it was all right. The context is so sensitive and difficult to read.

The time went too fast. The next morning (Sunday) we had to leave early because we had an afternoon show two hours away in Holland with a 12:30 sound check. Not much sleep and not nearly enough time to spend with friends I hadn’t seen in 9 years.

The rest of the tour is a blur. Joanna met us at Sunday’s show, as did my brother-in-law, Richard; niece, Zaou; nephew, Rubio; and their friend, Edo, who all live in Holland. After the show we had dinner together then drove to the airport so Katy and I could return the rental car and go back to Den Haag with Joanna. The last days of traveling, she drove us.

Monday was Eindhoven. Trees, the SEL CSR there, came with family and friends to the show. They had a great time. I stayed in a hotel that night and spent Tuesday morning working with Trees in her office. It was a really good thing to do. There is no way you can understand what someone really deals with without being in their workplace.

About noon, Trees dropped me at the train station to take a train to Hilversum, where I caught up with Katy and Joanna. We did a live radio show there then walked around downtown. I bought a CD by a hot British band to take home to Greyson. Our show that night was in nearby Lage Vuurshe. Once again some old friends and not enough time. We were feeling pretty exhausted by now. Only long experience kept us from biting the heads off of every stranger we met. I only bit one off. (I apologized.)

We got back to Den Haag about 1AM. The next day (Wednesday) was Joanna’s show near her home and the end of the tour. We got a little rest, settled our business with Joanna, and prepared for travel on Thursday: I to the US and Katy to the UK. The show went great. It was the last time we will perform together for a long time. It doesn’t happen often.

***

The time is bittersweet. I left Katy at the airport heading for her gate. My voice is OK. I have learned how to protect it successfully, even the long day Monday---working with Trees, catching the train, and doing the radio interview and then the show---didn’t damage me. That’s a great thing to know for the future.

Passing customs in Seattle was refreshingly simple. When asked my business in Europe, I explained that I’m a musician and was touring. This only drew a brief scowl and a few extra questions, not the pull-me-aside-and-search-my-luggage response that is common at JFK in New York.

I am so ready to be going home, but I hope that Katy and I can continue to find the time and means to put ourselves together on stage many more times to come. People genuinely love what we do.

I had forgotten what that feels like and how much it matters.