Pale blue and gauzy white swaddling a floating fiery sun. This Amsterdam hotel window is throwing light across our bodies, curled and convalescing under wrinkled white covers. I want to throw the covers and the light back—be a silvered mirror to let the dark corners of these cities be seen. But we must rest and heal. Concerts must be cancelled. Cells must turn over. So we can get better and get home, and become mirrors again. 

Two books that I’ve been reading (Blood by Allison Moorer, and A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson) have let me visit spaces outside these walls. They have shown me childhoods and adulthoods on paper that make me grateful for mine. They have shown me how much we have progressed and changed in relatively little earthly time, and I subsequently realize how much still stagnates. How much we need each other because there is so much to figure out. And that as much as we want to be and go it alone, which is valid and often necessary for introverted over-thinkers, we could never do it all without all of the others.

And it all makes me feel my smallness. A speck in some creature’s undiscovered sky, too far through the rabbit-hole of time to ever be known by one another, dreaming of each other anyway. So the fear seems silly now. Fretting in a green room over a voice that is not cooperating, that cannot do what the planned set list is asking it to do, just moments before it is to be done. 

The potential of shame can feel life-threatening. 

The experience is very real, and then it’s nothing but a blink in the looking back. But in the moment it’s everything because that moment is all I’m promised. And I promised I was going to give something that I didn’t think I could actually deliver. 

And I couldn’t. So we figured out what I maybe could. Scratching off songs, writing in others. Better choices for the situation. Pete talked more. I focused harder than I ever have on breath placement of every syllable. We made it through and had a beautiful night with such a warm and loving audience. And then my body let me know it wasn’t just lack of sleep and going at it too hard causing the trouble...I got sick. We were hopeful I’d recover after only a few missed shows, but then Pete got sick too. So here we sit in a hotel bed, wishing we were singing and sharing more songs here in the Netherlands as we came to do. 

If I close my eyes against the lamplight and reflect on these last few fever-dream days, I see a pendulum inside my head—my thoughts a tangled weight suspended from a spindly neuron, the whole thing swinging wildly. Trying to find balance between the instinct to care too much and the danger of not caring at all, between being too precious and the giving in to the triviality of everything if we stand back too far to look at it.

If I open my eyes to ways forward, I see that maybe the way to walk a path that sits between these edges doesn’t involve wrangling the pendulum to a stop and letting it hang still from its pivot point. Maybe we’re supposed cut it free. Let it be a compass needle, guided by our purpose. 


Thank you for being here with us, and out on the road to greet us. Once we get stateside we’ll be starting in Mobile, AL on Sept 9th and Cumming, GA on Sept 10th then on to NC, TN, IL, MN, MI, OH, PA, AR, and MS. We're thrilled that we'll be joined by our dear friends and phenomenal artists Clay Parker & Jodi James for the second half of the tour.

All dates for the next couple of months are a further scroll below (or click here to jump to them). We’d love to see you if you’re comfortable attending in-person shows. And we'd love your recommendations for possible spots to play somewhere in the range of 10/2 - 10/5.