I have just completed the first little part of my ‘Songwriter’s Summer Series’ tour in Southern Queensland. Yay! It was three days, which seems so small but felt so big. We drove from Brisbane to Stanthorpe, Stanthorpe to Goondiwindi, then to Toowoomba, and now home again. It was everything exciting, wholesome, stressful, demanding, and exhausting, all bundled with a whole lot of learning about touring, performing, being a friend, professionalism, speaking your mind and so many other things.
So if you’re interested, here are some things I’ve learnt so far:
Being your own sound person is quite difficult and exhausting.
You have to set up all your equipment (it’s all so friggen heavy), you have to know how it fix something when it’s making strange sounds, and in the end, you can only pray to the good people upstairs that the sound is enjoyable for those listening.
Planning and preparing is wonderful, but you need flex.
I planned everything, I had snacks, I had water, I made lists, I had FULL car insurance (nothing’s going wrong on these three days I would tell myself)…. until it did….Sunday night comes and we couldn’t drive home due to flash flooding …. so I eventually flex up. We stay put, I book us a motel that hopefully doesn’t smell like old people (it did smell like old people) and we ate KFC, drank tea, watched trash TV, played UNO and laughed at the inconvenience of the uncontrollable weather.
Taking risks is everything
I have realised that I feel most alive when I am moving at a rate just slow enough to not trip over my own two feet, and just fast enough that I’m on the cusp of spilling over. It’s the perfect balancing act. This tour might not look like a risk from someone looking on, but for me it’s a big giant leap into a world that I have no idea about (and because I’m a perfectionist that’s bloody terrifying!). So in planning and playing out this series of shows (which is something I’m super proud of), it’s a big risk. A big juicy risk with great chance to fail and succeed in equal measure.
So far we have succeeded in many ways, and failed in a few as well. It’s a great lesson for me that failures don’t always knock the wind out of you, sometimes they are quiet and can float on without being made into giant mountains of sucky-ness.
We head off on Friday for another weekend of show on the ‘Songwriter’s Summer Series’ and I can’t wait!
After our show in Stanthorpe at Little Theatre Co.
(Our exhaustion and exhilaration captured beautifully) feat. Erin Ellis, Mia Amrisyanda & me. Taken by one of our fav people we met on our adventures, Kathryn (from Kathryn the Band)