December 28 2024
Queens, NY • Cassette
Franz Charcoal, Long Beard, Emily Yacina, Cameron Wisch, Gabby’s World
(all solo sets)
When Cameron asked me to play this show, I already had a show coming up on December 13, a couple weeks before, at Cassette, which would make the show on the 28th my third show at Cassette in 2024. I really wanted to take it, so we set it up with me as a “special guest” until December 14, when we announced I would be playing. It was just such an incredible bill, I could not let the opportunity pass me by.
The last time I had played solo was at Topos a year and a half before and that show really rocked my confidence. I had felt totally insane, out of control. and out of practice with performing. I was also coming off of a really nasty flu that had completely decimated my vocal range with an intense bout of laryngitis after the show on the 13th, and I lost a lot of control over my vocal muscle memory which helps me with accurate pitch. By the 28th, my voice had mostly been restored to sounding normal, but I still didn’t have total control over my pitch. I weirdly opted to play the set on the acoustic guitar I had been practicing on, Barrie’s dad’s carbon fiber acoustic that I love dearly, but that has higher action than I’m used to contending with in a show setting. Also, the last solo show I had played was at Topos maybe two years before that and it had really rocked my confidence. No big deal, just a couple of minor, chewy obstacles.
When we arrived, Cameron asked me to go on first, so I set up my stuff and got ready to play. I opted to play sitting down because I had played standing up at Topos without having practiced that way and I felt that that contributed to how bad it felt. But sitting down restricts the lungs and makes singing a bit harder. I started the set with my songs in the tuning DADGAD and then would switch to standard for the rest of the set. The DADGAD songs went fine; I played a new song, “Solid,” for the first time ever live and it felt like I was playing it for an eternity, and “33” was hard to sing, but otherwise, all good enough. When I began to tune back to standard tuning, the B string snapped. That guitar has never faltered, it was meant to go on sailing trips and not warp, and it sounds absolutely amazing, but suddenly it did the most annoying thing it could have chosen to do lol! I played the rest of the set without the B string, which just sounded a bit neutered, but probably just to me.
Anyway, these obstacles are not the point, I’m just trying to fill in every detail so I can access how I felt. All in all, not my best solo set, but I was so happy to get to be a part of the evening.
The point of this recollection is the rest of the night. I was so inspired by the rest of the show. Emily Yacina and Cameron played this one song that they wrote together that I think about regularly, but I can’t find it anywhere now. Leslie’s set was so beautiful. I hadn’t seen her play in years and it was so cool to hear those songs again, and all of the beautiful new ones. And Greta’s set was perfect. I’ve said to her a million times that she’s one of the only people I’ve seen pull off live performance as magnetically as a full band. My mind never wanders during her sets; I’m always on the edge of my seat listening and studying her lyrics, accompaniment, and poise. It’s so cool to watch. I had tears streaming down my face during “Do I Wanna Wonder Forever” and besides how sad that song makes me I was having a whirlpool of emotions.
Later, I had to process the overwhelm of how intense the whole evening was, experiencing this chaotic nostalgia of being part of a bill that would have been totally normal like ten years ago and now feels so precious or something, since it’s been ripped from the DBTS living room and replanted in Cassette’s weird but cool but definitely weird vibe. Hard to capture what I’m trying to express. It’s like, obviously in the grand scheme of things, I experience time passing and aging and I think about how I want to continue having a graceful and fulfilling career as I progress through each decade of my life, but it rarely makes me feel existential. I am very lucky that I’m not prone to caring about existence and how long and short life is blah blah blah, but then that show filled me with such intense, indescribable feelings that I overflowed with tears and had to chill myself out so I could revisit them later because if I had let myself give in at the show, I would have caused a real scene of sobbing uncontrollably and being unable to explain what was happening and also being unable to stop.
I guess what I’m trying to say is, suddenly the whole experience felt simultaneously precious and underwhelming, like we were all having this cool experience all together again in very different places in our lives, both from where we were before and from one another, in this really nice-sounding but also really uncomfortable environment of Cassette, a venue I really do love dearly but is also a venue, but also it’s not…like it doesn’t hold the same, comfortable, familiar charge as Silent Barn or Shea Stadium or DBTS did, places from the time that that lineup would have been billed together. Rather, Cassette usually gives me a feeling that some of the other places we played in the earlier years that I didn’t like playing at as much, but have come to cherish after the fact. I think mostly because I guess Cassette just doesn’t feel like it’s ours. But on the night of Cameron’s show, it did feel like it was ours and it felt familiar and charged and it was overwhelming and super emotional. It was cool and also triggering and also really happy and also really sad.
Anyyway, I was really, really grateful that I got to play that show and it gave me some feelings to chew on in therapy the following week lol.
