St Louis, Milwaukee, Minneapolis:

Cities at night in the American heartland feel like islands in the darkness. Driving out of St Louis on our bus and I think I’m in a submarine. Through the smoked windows I see the proud new Cardinals stadium glide past, then our hotel complex, and soon the city lights thin and recede into the darkness around us. The Springsteen song made more sense – in England, the darkness on the edge of town is a pause between the cities. In America, the cities punctuate the darkness. And there’s nothing, really nothing, for miles and miles. It’s spooky. The protestant paranoia makes more sense here.

In Milwaukee the lake was bare – no boats, no running lights in the distance, no rigs or refineries. The water was a cold crystal turquoise and it caught the light like hard polished gemstones. With my back to the sun the sky to the north looked cold and dark. From the 23rd floor of our hotel the land stretched on three sides, flat and featureless forever (looking West from our Chicago hotel was the same). I felt isolated and alone there. The city felt too quiet for me and because of the space around town the usual quiet Sunday feeling was amplified tenfold. It reminded me of being a teenager and feeling trapped in my hometown, knowing that life was taking place elsewhere and that here, the only thing to do was kill time. I wondered what despair you might feel living there day in and day out.

The venue was across the road from the hotel where Jeffrey Dahmer murdered one of his victims. I guess I answered my own question, from both points of view.

The venue (Eagles Ballroom) also had ghost stories of its own, and as the building was old with a nineteen twenties gothic feel to it. There were basements and sub-basements we all wound ourselves up, trying to find the empty swimming pool where supposedly there’d been sightings of a ghost and where someone had been beaten to death over a bad debt. (To get to it you have to go through the “Kid Rock” room – a dressing room specially created for Kid Rock when he played there. When anyone at the venue mentioned this room they chuckled, as if they had first-hand knowledge of some debauchery. One can only imagine what Kid Rock does in a basement in Milwaukee for kicks: Go on now, imagine it…see? Creepy, yes?)
We never saw the ghost – the door to the pool was locked, but either way we all felt thrilled to have tried. Part of me didn’t want to see the deserted pool with its flashes of mysterious light and its nebulous shadows. Part of me was genuinely scared.

Days pass on tour sometimes before you realize a week has gone by, then a month. I listen to songs on my I-pod like they’re friends. For this tour I have a soundtrack that I’ve condensed to one play-list that will forever remind me of lying in my bunk, rumbling through the night, trying to sleep and half-dreaming along to the songs. Suddenly I’m overwhelmed by an almost sappy urge to write to the artists and to say thank you. I like being a fan; it reminds me of what my job is about. I like remembering that the point of all this creation, all this effort isn’t about shifting units or tickets or tee shirts but about finding emotional connections through music. And with my playlists on repeat, it’s a comfort and a vindication to realize that despite the yawning black American night flooding all around me, and no matter what I am feeling, I am not alone.

Not completely.