The Tennaissance

Waxahatchee heads home

Hi, everybody. I’m writing from another tour rest stop suburgatory. This time in New Jersey.

I’m starting to think there’s a reason I end up writing when we’re in slightly depressing, totally culture-less places like this, a reason that goes beyond the fact that these are rare moments of solitude on the road. I think the Mall as a Village highwayland kind of makes you want to create something in mild protest, to bring a little life to otherwise inhuman surroundings.

Anywho, we’re here, and the tour is over. We played 19 shows on this leg, for 63 proper Tigers Blood shows this year. That’s all the dates on the tour laminate! We have more to play—including Riot Fest in Chicago and a few weeks in Australia—but the big 2024 legs are done. I’m proud of what we’ve done.

It’s time to get home, restore our sleep hygiene… I’ve found myself in a now-familiar late-tour pattern the past two weeks, inching into a nocturnal abyss. We’re now in 4AM bed, 12PM rise territory. Milquetoast rockstar shit. We’ll get home and have to return to normal person hours, for day jobs and odd jobs, sunlight maximization and social compatibility.

Tourmate Tre Burt seen from the green room monitor at the Sylvee in Madison, WI.

Family, Casey: I’m coming home having turned into a tennis fan. Katie took me to the US Open and it changed me. I didn’t even know how to read the tennis scoreboard when I sat down at the Alcaraz-Tu match on August 28th and now I’m critiquing overblown forehand shots and analyzing Jack Draper’s on-court vomiting, Frances Tiafoe’s unflappability, Aryna Sabalenka’s misunderstood intensity. (Actually, I’m usually just imitating the kinda funny way chair umpires enunciate the word “deuce.”) And… I bought a polo shirt. What is happening to me?!?

I’m far from the first person to think about how sports and music relate to each other, how they’re both creative. I had always thought that rhythm was part of sports only by coincidence, that it didn’t really have a first-class relationship to rhythm the way music does. After watching tennis for a few weeks (and tossing baseballs around parking lots with the band and crew again) I feel like throwing and hitting and catching balls is at least as related to rhythm as music is. The relationship is just inaudible, or only audible by accident.

And there’s a whole other topic of physical grace in sports, just as there is in music. It’s really fun and beautiful to watch someone who has hyper-practiced spatial awareness of an instrument. There’s not a huge difference between tennis players knowing (feeling) exactly where to put a racket and guitarists knowing exactly where to go on a fretboard. And everyone’s personality comes out in the minute ways they get from one place to another and all the motions they make in between. It rules.

I’m partial to the audible, music kind of rhythm, still, mainly because you can mix it with melody, and oh my god, then you’re dead. Then you’re alive. You’re subliming. But I’ve come away from the Waxahatchee Tennaissance with a greater appreciation for ball hitters. Good job, tennis!

Speaking of balls… I’m late for a date to meet the rest of the band and crew at a Buffalo Wild Wings to watch football and find vegetarian food options on their panel-researched menu. Football is the most warlike of all sports. Maybe it’s the fife and drum music of inaudible rhythmic arts.

XO,
Spencer

P.S. Listen to Sima Cunningham’s new solo album, High Roller! I play drums on half of it!

P.P.S. I re-uploaded last year’s drumprints vol. 1 to my website. Now available as a one-click no-strings-attached old-fashioned download. (It’s still free on Bandcamp, too.) I love the things people make with drumprints. Maybe you want to use them too?