MPC: Atlantan Redemption

Pop-up tour diary day 3/8

At 4pm at waterlogged Chastain Park in Atlanta yesterday it didn’t seem possible that thousands of people were gonna show up to watch us play in the rain. We were sound checking in the kind of damp air that permeates your bones and makes you want to eat tomato soup at home, not see Wilco and Waxahatchee play for three hours. But people showed up anyway. And I looked on with really grateful disbelief when they started trickling in to the park, wearing ponchos and rain jackets, some families in matching ones. You could see Wilco’s breath while they played.

For Waxahatchee, last night was Atlantan redemption. Last year, we got rained out at Shaky Knees festival. Well, we got on stage and we played our entire show. But I’m not sure anyone heard any of it, because horizontal rain had turned the festival banners in front of the PA into the equivalent of a brick wall, boomeranging all of the sound away from the audience back to the stage, where it made loops of squealing feedback that no technical intervention could overcome.

As song after song went by with no relief, sound engineers from other corners of the park started descending on our stage like nightcrawlers to an accident scene. Of course they didn’t know more or have any more skill than our beloved ████ ████. (Names of the innocent have been redacted.) It would be discovered later that the only solution to the acoustic horror would have been to send a person with a bowie kife up the speaker scaffolding to cut the banners down. In the rain.

A cherry on top: I could see lightning strikes from the stage while we played. I was glad the promoters didn’t stop us from getting on stage. But after that I wondered whether we should stop us. Thankfully no one was hurt.

The shining light of that day at Shaky Knees was Songs for Kids, an Atlanta-based nonprofit that provides music education/therapy to young people with disabilities. That morning I had wandered out of our bus onto the main field of the festival. As I got close to a stage it sounded like they were playing something familiar. One of our songs even. It was “Right Back to It.” And the people on stage were kids. And they sounded amazing.

More members of the Waxahatchee band joined me in the field. Katie got on stage and sang a song with them. I heard that those kids still talk about the day the person whose songs they were singing seemed to appear out of thin air and start singing alongside them.

I got to reunite with a bunch of them and their teachers, Josh and Weston, yesterday. I sat in during their band practice and we talked about their first tour coming later this summer. Absolute joy. If you have a venue that might want to host Songs for Kids, get in touch with them.

Thirty minutes to show time in Chattanooga. Before I go, I want to say: Happy Mother’s Day, mom. I love you so much. Your strength awes me. And there’s absolutely no one cooler, no one with better taste in stuff that goes in a house, and no one with a moral compass truer than yours. Thank you for being my mom!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Metal Prism Chutes correction: I don’t think I stand by “stomach is a knot, arms are spaghetti” comment from yesterday’s entry. I think there are better similes for how to use your arms while you’re drumming. It might be more like a K’Nex toy or one of those marionettes that can switch from being floppy to rigid at the push of a button. And your abs shouldn’t always be flexing when you drum, like some sort of music-based pilates regimen. But the obvious, fundamental claim is that your body is related to your musical spirit! Ok, thanks.