love

Flexible, charismatic, jet-lag lands and streaks of rain the tarmac, the club, the glasses of beer, the nap, the twenty minutes of honey-golden sunlight through Marcel’s living room window. A quiet through sliding wood doors. Heather and Kerry bundled under jackets and comforters that need comforting themselves.

*

The room comes and goes and is full of people, and then we’re the only ones left, carrying our high-spirits through the air cold with exhaustion. We couldn’t imagine a warmer welcome. You can’t forget, so let’s keep looking at each other. Help me with this song, will you? And you, in the back, thank you for the way you raise your glass when you ask for an encore. Thank you for tripping over cobblestone streets to get here. Thank you for keeping cities like this alive, eating their way down through highways, taverns, churches, and plate tectonics.

*

This one? I believe we were sharing dairy products on the lawn along the highway between Bern and Lausanne. Yes? No? The jet fighter is at rest-stop.

*

And what a welcome we get from you, you big old lovely place, with your dadaist oops of history sliced into regularity, Calvinism, and theories of relativity and space-time inconstancy. Sold out at Klub Helsinki, and Room absolutely rocks the entire crowd two or three inches off the floor. We hit the stage running, scrape our knees a little, but the crowd carries us through.

*

And then there a moments that are just like throwing a stone into water.

Yes, I’ll need another coffee. Glad you guys can sleep back there with the guitars in your laps. Have you ever seen anything so throw-away beautiful as this countryside sliding into industry by the medieval river.

*

We’re waiting for our history to catch up. We’re waiting for our band mates to show up. We’re waiting for the stop light. We’re waiting for the pain to stop. We’re waiting for the headlights to come on. We’re waiting for the kicking of the chorus. We’re waiting for the smoke to clear. We’re waiting for the windshield to come crashing in. We’re waiting for our clothes to dry. We’re waiting for a place to sleep. We’re waiting for the silence of the water. We’re waiting for someone to touch. We’re waiting for the sound check. We’re waiting for the check. We’re waiting for the turn-off. We’re waiting for the alarm clock. We’re waiting for the cigarette, the playwright, and the corn-ball comedy. We’re waiting for Luna, beautiful Luna. We’re waiting for our skin to dry. We’re waiting for the sound of cowbells. We’re waiting for wireless. We’re waiting for the promoter. We’re waiting for Bubble Blaster. Kerry is in our van, waiting. Café Engel is slowly emptying of people. The warmest of crowds. Memories of a fountain behind the angel, four am, five years ago. Still waiting. We’re waiting for the tubes in the amplifiers to stop glowing. We’re waiting for the guilt to pass. We’re already waiting for the next time.

*

We can feel the cold through the floorboards of the stage. Kerry’s heart is really hot, though, and Jay looks like a great and utterly lovable mess. This is one of those really good, effortless times.

*

The audience is skating, or dancing, or something, on a liquid floor, and we’re making this dark, ancient stone basement shimmer with our sweat. Something about the lighting blinds, but also allows us to see eyes out there, deep, pooling, clearly in the audience, and its easy to sing tonight, to an audience like this.

*

For a moment, while tuning the guitar, I can remember the feel of one kilometer of cold water slipping past my back, my eyes squinting out of the spray to look across Lake Geneva, mountains rocking to and fro from stroke to stroke.

*

Lausanne, three am. Jean-Cosme is not sure how to get himself and his wife home. We’re not sure how to get the amps up the stairs. Jan Haux documents everything patiently, even snapping the way we’ve subverted the city’s advertising. When you stand at the front of the van, leaning against the hood and look down the steep cobblestone hill, you can imagine how it goes all the way into the water, though you can’t see it, and you can imagine that someone once had a little farmhouse right on this cigarette-and-beer-bottle-ridden spot, and found water here, high on the hill–Water that just emerged after hundreds of years of silently seeping through bedrock, then gasped its way quickly down into a lake. If it does not emerge, nothing is built. But once it emerges, it disappears. And we’re left with these stone bones in which to try to be civil to each other.

Touring is suspended disbelief, suspended animation, suspended exaltation, suspended sleeplessness, a never coming quite down, a never of never, and a fist-fight with all the doubters at Lourdes.

*

We had some trouble with the parking. The phone rings at 4 am. Locked out. The hills are steep. Heels on the pavement in the early morning.

*

A band of six very merry women comes up to us and congratulates us on the show. Arm in arm, loud as cats, one in a newly purchased t-shirt, and then they stumble around the corner, ankles twisting dangerously, still arm in arm, and they probably still are, or we hope so. That’s how we like to think of things.

*

Outside, the little Turkish boys are trading soccer cards. They are all hoping to get the Schweinsteiger card. Schweinsteiger: Hero of the 2006 World Cup, the afterglow of which we have have driven through in a radiantly fading summer all the way from Bavaria to Berlin.

*

I can’t tell if I’m hungry because I’m nervous, or nervous because I’m hungry, or maybe I’m just hungry and nervous after ten hours of driving. The kebab doesn’t sit well. But the nicely curved way in which these streets open up into a tiny little square for kiosks and mopeds, and a moment to stand with hands on hips and eyes closed reminds me of how cities used to be built for people–sized for their bodies, limited by sight-lines and a need for sky to help dry the clothes hanging outside. Even rich people still hang their laundry here. I forgot the wonderful smell of cotton sheets that have been bleached and dried by the sun.

*

Gerrit, you’re the one who is reminding me of this. We carried the amps up into your sunlit loft and had coffee by the window. I felt like I had my first proper shower in five days. The courtyard outside your window was alternately utterly still (a miracle for the inner city), and then burbling with the sounds of children in various stages of rebellion and acquiescence. In a head-slammed-shut morning we hung our laundry out your balcony and you made us play some songs really loud, so your neighbors could hear. I remember how brightly you smiled during that time.

*

When the show is over, what a pleasure it is to share those strangely alienated, spent, but overflowing few hours before sleep with your band mates, and the lovely lads from Room.

We were driving around in Bern, when Jay points out a man on the street with long, thinning, scraggly red hair and a beard down to his stomach and says: “Hey Kristofer, there’s your dad.” Jay proceeds to act out an imaginary meeting between Kristofer and his putative father:
?Kristofer: Hey dad! I haven’t seen you in years. We’re playing a show tonight right here in Bern. It would be so awesome if you would come to th…
?Kristofer’s Dad: Blöööööööhhh

*

We’ve never had children sit in on our sound-check before. In fifteen years, these two will be the nucleus of the hottest all-girl band to come from Bern, ever.

*

People have treated us with such warmth and respect, it just makes us want to put on better and better shows. To outdo what we thought we could do, and give more than what we thought we had brought along to give. And no, we’re not talking about the merchandise, though it’s selling fast. Can’t remember at what point we started adding that wonderful moment at the end of our encores where Jay and Kerry would come on stage in the middle of Elastic and just create mayhem for thirty seconds, but in the aftermath there were moments where the audience would be utterly still. And we’d be looking at each other. Them and us. Us and them. I believe they got to see us. God, I hope they saw us. I hope we didn’t hide anything from them.

*

We’re having our espresso at two am before the long drive to Zürich, to our beds. We’re on a bench. The night air is warm. The city is quiet. We look into the club and see a few stragglers talking with the owner in the lemon-meringue light. Capital city. Totally quiet.

Circles. Let’s start here, where she waves and goes towards the German shore.

*

Set lists. Similar, but never the same.

*

The fill builds from Heather on out. Let’s take it to the audience. Pull away. Leave that voice there, but make sure it hit the wall first.

*

Hey, it’s great to meet you. Thank you for the nice write-up. Yes, a beer would be lovely.

*

Wet grass, running behind houses along the Limmat, breathless. In the window, curtains, shimmering, losing it, thinking of finding it. A return. We were warming up in a small trailer, doing ridiculous vocal exercises. I remember. And I’m back.

*

Do you have an adapter for this kind of power outlet?

*

Hedge-hogs by the milk bowl.

*

Crossing the border. No, not crossing. Passing and re-presenting ourselves. Yes, crossing the border. Here’s the door. Cool crowd. Stamp me on the wrist. I just want to present myself again. Nobody stamps passports anymore.

*

And finally at Schokoladen! You come home to a place you’ve never played before. Ok. So you spent some good evenings here in other lives, other chapters, but this is a return that was always inscribed from the first time you walked in and sat in the corner with X and P.

*

Strangers mixed in with a few of our diasporic friends. The place vibes up. Given the p(X), where do we stand at the end? The middle of the floor. Surrounded.

*

Encore!

*

And again.

*

Given that the results are always unpredictable, what do you do to prepare? Given that no amount of preparation can guarantee anything, what can you guarantee? Sometimes you want to size up the room. Sometimes it’s best to hide. Sometimes it’s best to not care. Just like the succession of mirages whose return signifies life.

*

It’s important to catch the eye.

*

Are we going to make it to the afterparty? Yes, but this is fun too. Public Service Announcement: If you have any particular dietary needs (vegetarian or non-dairy or gluten-free or whatnot), it’s impossible to find anything to eat in Berlin after midnight. Difficult adjustment for people like us, afflicted as we are with a bad case of 24-hour Brooklyn-itis.

*

Driving back at 160 km/h. Leaving/returning. Tinu, are you there? How is the little hotel on top of the mountain? We need another day there. No I’m not actually talking to you, but you become someone to talk to through the windshield of orange-smoke darkness descending fast on the autobahn. You resuscitate your chances up there while we resuscitate our songs down here.

*

Another rest stop.

*

Thank you Bernd Figner, Jan Haux, Roman Elsener, Jean-Cosme Delaloye, Martial Vivot, Marcel Elsener, Adrian Elsener, Silvana Ceschi, The Haux family, Melissa, The Langenegger’s, Tom Rist, Frank Heer, Tinu Ballmer, Enno, Martin Rechsteiner, Gianni, Urs, Gerrit Engel, Simone Willeit (and any others I may have forgotten now, here, at two in the morning by the window, gutters overflowing and water falling five stories)

*

We’ll be back