Peter Peter Hughes

The quiet chuckle I get every time I go through airport security now with my Al Qaeda watch was so worth ten dollars.

So get this. Left my house this morning, Friday, at quarter past nine because they said for international you need to check baggage two hours before your (domestic) flight even though it's little ol' ROC and only ten minutes from my house and it typically takes five minutes to check in and go through security but based on previous experience [hyperlink to fifty pages' worth of bitching and moaning about lost bags and guitars] I'm going to take them at their word this time. In a little more than an hour from now I'll board a flight to Chicago, and from there another to Dallas-Fort Worth. Around eleven tonight I'll be on a plane with my bandmates bound for Sydney, with a short stop to refuel in Brisbane. In Sydney we'll go through customs and then get on yet another flight, this one to Perth, arriving around three in the afternoon local time on Sunday. Which equals three a.m. on Sunday in Rochester. Which equals, give or take, forty-two hours in transit.

If my bass and pedalboard actually show up in Perth when they're supposed to I'll be putting in a call to the Vatican, because that shit will be a fucking MIRACLE.

MOUNTAIN GOATS!!!

It's funny the things you discover going through travel receipts at tax time. I would never have guessed that I ate at Qdoba twice last year. I have zero recollection of ever having set foot in a Qdoba. I'm not even sure I know what it is. It's like Chipotle, right? Kinda?

Totally packed laundromat, Sunday afternoon. Entire families, kids running around. Nearly everyone speaking Spanish. Random Jack Black movie on the TV. A pool table, an open wireless network. I could sit here all day.

We had to leave Florida, sadly. It was so warm, and so nice. The experience of being in Florida forever runs directly counter to my expectation of it. It should be awful; in so many ways it represents everything I despise and left California to get away from: heedless, hideous development, suburban blight, big-box hellishness. It's easy to forget how much of the land remains wild though, and ultimately untamable. And every time I've been there I've found it just unremittingly pleasant. Nearly so, anyway. Guessing the omnipresent "My heart begins beating 18 days after conception" billboards (with accompanying image of a freakishly blue-eyed infant, from which we might conclude that fetal colored-contact development starts around the same time) might get a little oppressive after awhile. But the shows were good (Tampa was amazing, actually), I got to drive Trudy's dad's Jaguar XK140 (totally rad, and surprisingly butch for such a gorgeously feminine car), and I kept alive my streak of swimming in the ocean every time I've been to St. Augustine (even in January). Viva Florida.

Atlanta by comparison is downright wintry. Great show last night at the Earl though, and nice to return to a smaller room here off-cycle after playing the much bigger theater-type Variety the last couple times through. Tomorrow is Athens and the 40 Watt which I'm excited about for the simple reason that I've never played there. Then to North Carolina to finish out the run.

Few things in the world more soul-restoring on tour than an hour in a quality laundromat. The kids in here are fucking adorable.

Hey everybody. I've been a bad livejournaler. Never did get around to that Bright Eyes tour, even given six months of baby leave. Suffice to say Bright Eyes tour was fun. Someday I'll put up the photos and we can all relive those halcyon days.

And yes, not to bury the lede, but I did say baby leave. Me and John both! Totally coordinated in an ultimate achievement of band unity. (Kidding. It just happened that way, weirdly.) John and Lalitree had a little boy named Roman at the end of August; scarcely more than a month later Patricia and I welcomed our baby girl Natalia. Babies! Babies, it turns out, are awesome.

And now here we are a week into our first tour as parents. Tough being away, but I gotta say: as someone who has spent much of the past decade trying to explain to people that tour isn't vacation, that despite appearances it is actually work -- enormously gratifying, frequently fun, and even, on special occasions, not unglamorous work, but work nonetheless, with all the attendant frustrations, tedium, and unpleasantness of any job, however awesome? Well, guess what. Compared to taking care of a three-month-old, tour is fucking vacation. Wheeee!

It's been good so far. Playing a bunch of new songs, which is exciting. Austin, Houston, New Orleans, Tallahassee, Orlando last night. We're in Florida all week during the run-up to the GOP primary here. There are actually Mitt Romney signs. Also, it is warm.

Jon Wurster and I reached the uncomfortable conclusion last night that we seem to get more enjoyment out of terrifically bad music than we do from listening to good music. What is up with that.

As has become the norm, I never finished off the last tour here. Let's see how much I can reconstruct.

Costa Mesa was ________________. Weirdly, I did not experience any sense of deja vu connecting me to my fledgling rock youth, but instead found myself wondering why I'd come three thousand miles to play a show at the Bug Jar.

In Los Angeles I remember texting John during the day saying dude can we please just go Shellac from now on in L.A. and not have a guestlist at all? As usual the show itself was fine and I ended up having a great time but Christ almighty the days leading up to it I just wanted to hide. The L.A. show did however feature the public debut of the Team Hughes-Wurster shirt, which was awesome but unfortunately requires more explanation than I really have time for at the moment. Unveiling went off beautifully, though—I don't think I'd ever seen JD look as flummoxed as he did when Jon and I came back out for the encore wearing them.

One other notable occurance: In line at Starbucks one morning my antennae pick up a familiar signal. It's very faint, and difficult to make out over the midmorning coffeeshop din, but I can tell that whatever song has just started is one that is known to me. I strain to make out the chords, and then the drums drop in. Oh right. It's us. "Beautiful Gas Mask," the one on the new record where Brandon, during mix, graciously accommodated my request that the bass sound precisely like Seventeen Seconds-era Cure.

If you'd have told me, in high school, upon picking up my friend Brian's Beatle-bass and plucking out my first tentative notes, that I would one day be standing in line at Starbucks listening to myself on the in-store music mix ... I would've said, "Star-whah?" (There was no such thing as Starbucks where I lived then, see.)

I guess the weirdest thing about it was that it just didn't seem that weird. As I looked around the room, it was clear that nobody else was aware of anything out of the ordinary: they all went about their line-waiting, order-taking, drink-making, cellphone-tapping business. Girl ahead of me in line kinda bopped her head absently. What was perfect was the fact that it was the Starbucks nearest the hotel, on Franklin, as opposed to the touristy one further down the street, populated by looky-loo out-of-towners, at the giant Times Square-ish Kodak Theatre complex. Here instead amongst the people who actually lived and worked nearby, the P.A.s and runners and other-side-of-the-camera types with idle walkie-talkie and earbud sets hanging by their sides, I was just another anonymous culture laborer. We make, the world takes!

(Amusingly the next morning the touristy Kodak Theatre Starbucks was playing Destroyer. Merge Records: your home for java rock.)

We played out the string the next night in Santa Barbara, another curious booking and a night most memorable for me for a snippet of overheard conversation. Patio at dusk, pair of fifty-ish dudes come out for a smoke. Go-to-hell shades, gold chains, unbuttoned shirts, rolled up coatsleeves, one of them even had one of those ridiculous energy bracelets. Dude one says to dude two, appraisingly: "Yeah, looks pretty cool. My funk band, Area 51, is playing here tomorrow." Roll credits.

Anyway as you might've guessed by this point I'm bothering with all of this because we're about to leave again, this time for a week and a half of shows opening for Bright Eyes, taking in a festival in Montreal at the first weekend and ending the next at Lollapalooza. In an unusual reversal, everybody else has left for tour already—John and Brandon flew to Chicago on Monday to pick up the Sprinter and backline, JW left yesterday—while I'm typing this from my couch at home, as the first show, later today, is in Lewiston, New York, outside of Buffalo, not much more than an hour from my driveway. Which means I'm actually going to get in my car and drive to play a Mountain Goats show, and then get back in my car and drive home to sleep in my own bed. Dudes will then physically pick me up at my house the next morning.

Meantime I'm half-rehearsed, not yet packed, and having a hard time processing the idea of leaving for tour without driving to the airport (or, at the very least, the Amtrak station) first. Time to get my shit together.

Man it's been a long time since I've been awake for a drive down the 5.

Quickie recap:

Seattle was good but kinda tough. Showbox is nice to play but this was the third time in three shows that the sound onstage has been, erm, challenging. Just a weird room. Makes it hard to get fully into your work. We managed.

Vancouver: Mellow border crossing into Canada, small-ish but not unpleasant venue, bad sushi, great show. Day or two after the hockey riot, much handwringing in the papers but we didn't see much in the way of actual aftereffects. Bouncer at the club even had a Bruins flag hanging off the back of his Harley. "I'm ten feet from my bike all night," he said by way of explanation. "Hey, it's my team, I can't take it off now." Border guards crossing back into U.S.: the worst kind of state-sanctioned power-trip dicks. I hate the government.

Portland: Dinner at bar next door to venue, giant HD flatscreen five feet from my head tuned to Palladia with the sound down. LCD Soundsystem performing in familiar festival setting. Yes, I know that stage: we played on it last fall at ACL, an event that I negligently failed to chronicle in these pages. (It happens.) No matter. Next up: the Flaming Lips, who Patricia and I watched from stageside for a while before heading out into the crowd; then Spoon who we saw a bit of too, then some other stuff, and then ... Sonic Youth! The song is "Mote"—I can tell from the first chords even without hearing it—and the camera angle at first is from exactly where we stood for the entire set, just off stage right, closest to Lee. Song goes on for a bit, cutting between shots, and then, about halfway through, sure enough, there we are in the darkened wings, Patricia with arms folded in front of her and me rockin' out like a total dork. Whooooo!

So yeah, I don't know if there's actually any footage of the Mountain Goats playing at that thing, but you can see me anyway. Too funny.

Portland show was freaking great. Fun night. Next morning wandered towards Powell's after breakfast and stumbled into the Portland Pride Parade instead. Spent an hour and a half laughing, cheering, and getting beads and candy thrown at me. Good times. Then sat in the Sprinter for eight hours to dry, hot Redding. Dreamt that Jerry Brown was governor again, like we were still kids. Weird.

Not much to be said about San Francisco last night other than maybe the best full-band Mountain Goats show ever. If it seemed like we didn't want to stop playing it's because we didn't. The stage at the Fillmore might be the best-sounding I've ever set foot on. It makes it so easy to be good. You hear everything, everything sounds great, every song is getting the best performance it's ever gotten, and it's just impossible not to get swept up in the joy of playing. Add a typically awesome SF audience and the result is a night we'll remember for a long time. So great.

En route at the moment, hilariously, to Costa Mesa. Costa Mesa where my old band DiskothiQ used to play shows for like three of our friends. This was before John and I even knew each other, which means I'm talking, yes, twenty-plus years ago. I know that I've either played or gone to see shows at a former incarnation of the venue we're playing tonight, but I can't for the life of me remember which of the innumerable weird random Orange County venues I frequented in my misspent college days it could be. Going to be a very weird night. Kinda stoked for it.

Pretty sure this is the hotel John and I stayed in the night we flew out here on our way to record We Shall All Be Healed. Almost certain of this. Funny.

Team Eggleston/Darnielle flew to Portland yesterday to pick up the rental, merch, and backline; Teams Feikert/Semo and Hughes-Wurster got to spend yet another day enjoying the Mall of America before flying here to Seattle, where Brandon and JD will be meeting us this afternoon. Rock logistics!

We stayed near the airport in Minneapolis, which meant we were also staying a quick shuttle ride or fifteen-minute walk along broad, multi-lane high-speed boulevard and across parking-lotted plains from the aforementioned megamall. I mostly walked, and only once had "faggot!" yelled at me from the window of a passing car. Angry mallteens.

Unlike most megamalls (or, indeed, malls), which generally either leave me feeling completely alienated from all of humanity (South Coast Plaza) or fighting the simultaneous urges to throw class-war bricks through windows or just go home and smother myself with a pillow (King of Prussia), the Mall of America was surprisingly chill. As monuments to consumerism go, I mean. But then, apart from an obligatory Lush stop, I didn't shop at all. I ate, admired the giant Lego sculptures, had fun watching kids stumbling off the rides, and went to the aquarium.

Twenty bucks for the aquarium. Sounds a little steep—it is, after all, at the mall—but for twenty bucks I spent an hour and a half tripping balls. It's always the unexpected things that get me: the seahorses (they mate for life!), the razor fish, the jellies. When I finally get to the tunnel and the giant fucking sharks swimming right over my head it's like the knockout blow. Recommended.

Yesterday Yuval and Trudy and I went back and rode some rollercoasters. It was awesome.

Show was great. Playing as a three-piece in the UK was cool just inasmuch as it demonstrated we could still do it and kick ass and not have it feel like damn, something's missing. That said, it's nice having Yuval back. Fun night.

Posting, yes, from the airplane; currently at 32,000 feet according to the flight tracker. AirTran sent me a promo code a few weeks ago, and while I can't recommend it particularly—advertising everywhere, nightmarishly crowded gates, and "Boeing 717s" (which are actually just retrofitted forty-plus-year-old DC-9s) with bordering-on-unbearable seating—well, free internet and Hipster Runoff "blogradio" on the satellite are making up for a multitude of sins at the moment. If the lady in front of me reclines her seat even a centimeter however this laptop is toast and you'll not be hearing from me again.

En route to Minneapolis where we're doing a sort-of one-off on our way out west for a quick run down the coast. Team Feikert/Semo are back; Trudy's in the seat directly behind me, in fact, internetting away as well.

More later. I have to, uh, check my email or something.

One of the rad things about a career in show business is residuals. You're probably like me in the sense that you've always assumed that every person you see on TV is free to pursue a life of leisure just based on the checks that roll in each month in perpetuity. Now that the Mountain Goats have cracked the big-time I'm happy to report that this is exactly the case. I can't even go away for a couple of weeks without coming home to another official-looking envelope. Here's one right here from NBC Universal, says something about Late Night with Jimmy Fallon foreign cable rebroadcast something something, and it looks like a check for ... lessee here ... okay, sweet, $10.80! Oh wait though, there's some federal taxes taken out, and forty-five cents for social security, and sixteen cents for Medicare, okay and some New York state stuff, so, um, scrolling down here to the actual check, okay, looks more like actually $6.38. Still though. Is that not awesome? It's like, I feel certain that there was a time when I actually had to worry about money, or at least, you know, like, keep track of it? But damn, it just seems so foreign and distant to me now, it's hard to remember what that was even like. Anyway, who's up for lunch? My treat!

But yeah. Leeds, Glasgow and Newcastle shows all pretty great. Tough, accommodations-wise, but that's because we've been spoiled by success here in the U.S. Going to the U.K. for us is kind of like stepping back in time ten or fifteen years and paying your dues all over again, spending evenings in moldy, mildewed dressing rooms where the cock-drawing-to-places-to-sit ratio averages roughly 10:1. Keeps you young though, right? That's what I'm telling myself, anyway. And like I say, shows were great: awesome, enthusiastic and appreciative crowds every night. And not to be all cheeseball about it, but that is what counts.

Got back to London early Tuesday evening and wanted very badly to take advantage of a rare opportunity to see Art Brut and Keith TOTP and the Minor UK Indie Celebrity Allstar Backing Band on their home turf that night but was just out of gas and couldn't do it. So bummed. Probably for the best though as the next day's journey home was yet another cancelled-flights-and-subsequent-delays ordeal that I'm not even going to get into because whatever I'm home now, but I suspect that if I'd had five minutes less sleep the night before I would very likely have just snapped, set down my shit on the sidewalk in front of Terminal 3 and just started walking the fuck home from JFK. Next time. Next time Art Brut and Keith TOTP I mean.

See you in Minneapolis in a couple weeks!