This morning we all woke up in the shadow of the Wilco hotel, 370 feet off the ground and in the living room of our long-lost cousin Erin. Nitzan was still sweating hard from a bad dream he’d had about his dog getting shaved and amputated, Jack was downtown running off his morning oats, and Misha was further cementing his reputation as the LLC’s strongest sleeper.

We played Schuba’s last night with the indefatigable Eric Hutchinson, who managed to steal both the hearts and noses of the greater Chicagoland area between the hours of 8 and 11pm, then went out for our usual ritual of carousing, getting lost, trying to figure out where we’re going to stay for the night, and ultimately reparking the car minutes before sunrise and rolling the dice to see who gets to come out and plug the meter at 8:59am.

It’s been a good 24 hours in the land of Rick Nielsen, and I’d be sad to go even if we weren’t all about to drive through the night to get to DC in time for tomorrow’s soundcheck.

This is the American dream, people. Right here. We’re living it. Take notes.

Things We’ve Learned On The Road
Volume I : Air Travel

In keeping with our theme of being America’s foremost singing educators, I’ve begun compiling a list of Things We’ve Learned On The Road. It is my hope that somebody somewhere will be saved some degree of heartache and/or humiliation by the knowledge I am about to share with you.

Today’s theme is: AIR TRAVEL.

– Whenever possible, try to reserve a window seat toward the back of the plane. Window seat because you can sleep without having to get up for anyone, back of the plane because (a) you board first and have a better chance of finding space for your luggage in the overhead compartment, and (b) your odds of surviving a crash jump from .000000001% to .000000002% relative to the kids riding shotgun.

– If you’re going to be flying with a guitar, check with the specific airline to see what their carry-on policy is. Southwest and jetBlue are generally pretty good about letting you take them on, while we’ve had some knock-down, drag-out awfulness with the people at Delta. If you aren’t able to take your guitar on the plane, at least try to “gate check” it – this is where you bring it through security to the actual gate, then give it to a flight attendant to be hand-stowed along with the strollers, wheelchairs, and other things just inside the door to the luggage compartment. It’s still going to get cold and depressurized, but at least this saves it a trip through baggage handling. Either way, make ABSOLUTELY SURE you loosen the strings. People told me this before, and I kind of half-loosened them down to where they jangled, and it wasn’t enough. Metal shrinks a lot relative to wood and plastic when it gets cold, and if you don’t want the tuning pegs and bridge getting ripped out at 30,000 feet, your best bet is to take the strings out entirely and then either reattach them or change them once you land.

– Chew gum during takeoff and landing for a happier, healthier ride. Most people know that chewing gum helps pop your ears during the altitude change, but fewer people know that the relatively rapid changes in cabin pressure force gallons of recycled air into the mouths and noses of everyone on the plane, and that a mouthful of freshly flowing saliva creates a surprisingly effective filter for the entire plane’s worth of germs you’ll be inhaling by just sitting there.

– If you’ve got a long layover and are seriously on a budget, bring a granola bar, a packet of ramen, and an orange, then ask for a cup of hot water and a spoon from the friendliest looking barista at the in-terminal Starbucks. Voila, instant meal.

And that just about covers it for air travel. Stay tuned for more road science in our next installation, where we’ll cover: CAR TRAVEL.

I’ll tell you right now, this is not going to be the strongest post of the tour. Before this journey is over, we will have told nearly a hundred tales of sadness, weirdness, and triumph over impossible odds. There will be diary entries so horrifying you will crawl out of your skin, diary entries so uplifting you’ll want to drown us individually in buckets of saccharine, and diary entries so incredibly useful that you will lobby your local community college (successfully) for a full semester’s worth of credit hours. Every paragraph will iridesce with the warm glow of our trademark, accessible prose, and you will love us for it.

This is not one of those posts. This is the post that comes out just before sunrise, when you’ve woken up in a Haight Street living room twenty-one hours prior and spent fifteen of those hours sitting upright in a fast-moving vehicle, three of those hours putting on a rock concert in your hometown, and the remaining balance either unwrapping hamburgers or raiding your parents’ Public Storage unit for things you need, things of great value that may or may not be there.

Today was a great day. The tour so far has been a series of great days strung together with the hot thread of human kindness and (relatively) low gas prices. Tomorrow is going to be another great day. Tomorrow is the day that will either make or break me as a festival organizer, because tomorrow is the day we descend on Seattle like four giant, dirty locusts.

I have high hopes for tomorrow. I have high hopes for this tour.