In which the band gaily journeys from the bottom of the Hapsburg Empire to the top of the Ottoman Empire, through the green peaks made famous by the Sound of Music, the pine forests and pebbled beaches of the Italian coastline, the golden cliffs and army barracks of the Dalmatian shores, seven border crossings of once-Yugoslavia, the fertile plains of Pelagonija, the unplumbable abyss of the Balkan’s deepest lake and the bullet-battered capital of Kosovo before they board a creaky Lufthansa flight back to Beantown USA. …

Pt. 1. “It’s the only way to cure your jetlag,” says our Salzburg promoter following our late arrival to Austria, after a vehicular collapse in Downtown Canada and en route delays and missed flights. He has fed us, offered us rest at a fancy inn, doled out espressos and ibuprofens, allowed our forfeiture of a soundcheck and now he’s pretty sure that the only way to wake our wearied bones is with street pharmaceuticals. “Anything,” he says. “We have anything for you,” he stresses when our glazed expressions fail to meet his expectations. And then he spells it out: cocaine, ecstasy, ‘the green,’ or GHB. We decline, modestly certain that a designer chemical imbalance would throw our constitutions even further off course. We’re lucky that Stuck festival has us ending the festivities. Just enough time allotted to down three pots of backstage coffee and rally our senses past stage fright. Watching Creep and Mount Kimbie and Vivian Girls energizes us enough to get our spirits fully up. And Austria has always been good to us. I mean: really good to us. So we give every ounce of everything we have left, which isn’t much, so we take what we need from the crowd. Tonight, they are our most trusted dealer. They give us the fix. And I take all I can get. And I feel it rush through my veins and pop synapses in my brain and speed my heart. By the end of the set, some of our best pushers have joined us on stage trafficking their most addictive wares in surreal dance stretches. Like all good highs, it comes to an end in the very wee hours of the night’s morning and it takes a long time to come down. And it hits me: the best way to cure jetlag is to dance and sweat your ass off in an unreasonably hot concrete ballroom with new friends and drunk strangers. Nothing could have restored me better.
Pt.2. “Name one good modern Italian band.” No response. “It’s all Berlusconi’s fault.” This is said to us, verbatim, by one of the visiting Roman promoters at our show at Hana Bi in Ravenna. Italians don’t always have the most sensible perspective about themselves but we forgive them their coiffed eyebrows and Ferrari tracksuits and gaudy sunglasses because even their gas station espressos make the rest of the world’s coffee seem lukewarm. Plus their sunflower fields and hills of terraced vineyards and tomato patches and olive orchards make agriculture elsewhere pale in comparison. The GMO cash crops of North America seem in a persistent vegetative state of the comatose variety. So despite the fact that not only their nation’s financial woes but also all of their cultural ones are being laid blame on one doggedly sneaky president, we forgive them these unrealistic tangents because everything else they fabricate feels legitimate. Hana Bi’s resident chefs made us home-made pasta with tender fresh-caught scampi and buffala and pomodoro tomatoes so impossibly delicious that all thoughts on corruption scandals and Mafioso run markets and sleazy sex parties are trumped. Everyone at the table, however, seems to share the speedy metabolism to simultaneously eat, gesticulate, talk politics and ridicule the music industry with ferocity. There are no better dinner companions. This little gem on the Adriatic coast has hosted us before so we immediately feel amongst friends. They usher us away from the dinner table and dismiss our presence at the stage set in the sand because they really feel we mustn’t rush sound check. “Swim, guys. Please, come on. Swim. Go.” So we do. And it is like the sun herself went bathing prior. The waters are warm and shallow and we wrestle the gentle waves. By the time, the sun has collected herself and toweled off the salt and taken her long hours to bed, hundreds of kids have shown up to the beach for our show. It is an immensely good turn out and every one is ready. Dan makes the mistake of telling this wholly Italian crowd that we made out by the sea for long enough that I’m “probably now impregnated.” There is an eruption of congratulations despite my bashfully trying to convince the attendees of Dan’s humour. My microphone echoes but no one seems to hear my repeated disputes. After the show, nearly half the crowd, and certainly all of the women, come up to me with joyous hugs and kind warnings and even one teenager half my size pats my belly gleefully but then urgently informs me that I should “be careful dancing like that.” One woman actually takes a drink from my hand and says, “You shouldn’t be drinking these vodka tonics.” And a swooning couple says, with beaming joy, that they think they conceived after our last Ravenna show and now they have a bouncing bambino home with a babysitter. I get tired of trying to explain that I am, as far as I know, currently without child and I figure Italians will likely believe what best suits them anyhow. I know I’m stereotyping terribly here but if the President can be blamed for a lacking indie scene since the days of Italo Disco then it won’t hurt them to go on thinking that I was miraculously inseminated while fully clothed on the shores of the Adriatic. If I’ve learned anything about predominantly religious cultures it’s that they like to tell themselves pretty unbelievable stories. It gives them the faith to make sense of their crazy ridiculous world. So, beloved Italy concert-goers, because you oh-so exceeded our expectations, for you, I’ll pretend I’m expecting.
Pt. 3. “I think we’d have to write a Pros and Cons list to figure out whether we had a good time or not.” During our three days in Roseto Degli Abruzzi, everything was beautiful except when everything was difficult. On our last night, after having performed twice on the same stage at Sound Lab Festival set in a courtyard in the shiny Villa Comunale, Dan and I weighed the merits of our time in town. We jotted down the shared joys and perils on the paper tablecloth of the pizza joint we dined at, while we guzzled a liter of cheap wine and laughed when we didn’t cry. Here was our list:
· Upon arrival our hotel was switched without notice to a less nice hotel.
· There was no one to greet us at arrival.
No way to check in to the hotel. No way to check in with the festival.
· Every address on all info sheets was incorrect.
· All schedule timings on all info sheets were incorrect.
· A “documentary” about the festival being directed by a cocky but uninformed novice was sprung on us in ways that were intrusive and annoying.

· Our first soundcheck was hours late because the headlining Italian band was not urged to be just a little more prompt.
· Our soundcheck was also late because the keyboard stands we had requested were not provided.
· When finally we were allowed to soundcheck, we were brutishly rushed.
· The aforementioned band refused to clear their gear for any of the other bands to soundcheck and perform which caused enormous difficulty. When I explained that we tend to need more than three feet of space to move while playing, this was deemed unreasonable despite being an accident-prone lawsuit waiting to happen.
· Due to the counterintuitive meal scheduling, we were not able to eat before the show.
· Finally on stage, due to scheduling conflicts, we were asked to cut our set nearly in half.
· We felt rushed and dismissed through out.
· A full set was promised to be provided for our show the following day – in fact, it was cut even shorter.
· We were told not to unload our gear in the shared back stage because the “headliners” needed their space.
· We had no light or room to pack up our belongings.
· The following day was repeated in much the same way.
· We were tricked into being a part of the “documentary” on the second day when we thought we were being provided transportation to a beach.
· Soundchecks were in the most backwards order possible, causing the sound to be entirely changed by set time for all performing bands. Very dang difficult to play well.
· The light engineer half-heartedly shot lights in our faces or not at all.
· When some of our merchandise “disappeared” I was surprised that the staff had the gall to ask for more free merch.
· During the second show, the tangled mess from having been rushed off stage the night prior, meant that some of our cables were also mysteriously missing.
· A key on one of our synths had been busted during the night in its storage. When Dan said, “Oh that’s an F… I tend to use that key a lot and I have two months more of touring,” there was absolutely no empathy at all or offer to replace the broken instrument.
· Our hospitality vodka bottle arrived after our performance.
· The attendance was low and the crowd seemed confused and the energy was, in general, very stressful for every band we talked with. Every detail felt overly and unnecessarily complicated.
· And, finally, the woman in the next room over in our “long-stay” accommodations died. We listened to her dying for a long time.
I tried to reason with the hotel staff at nearly 4 am, after hours of being kept awake by a painful death rattle, that some help should be provided but nothing was done. They were wholly disinterested and I could do nothing to provide care in the situation. It was disturbing.
· We awoke to ambulance and police officers banging on the doors and down the hallways.
These, of course, were the cons. And though they sound like minor details, and no single one of them would have gone noticed if they hadn’t made their cumulative effect, they were a little deflating. Perhaps I should have prefaced this by saying we like playing in big and small places, both known and unknown to attendees, in all sorts of good and bad circumstances. What made this particularly challenging was that the disorganization was not explained. We did very little complaining but there was also very little empathy. What should have been fun (a small festival with small international and local acts in a small beach side town in Italy!) did not feel that way, for the most part. However, here were the pros:
· Dan looks really sexy on the beach.
· Wine is fantastic.
· Italians are really good at cooking when you get the chance to eat their food.
· Away from the festival grounds, the promoter and his girlfriend were much more relatable. They took us to a pebble beach, they made us sandwiches, we even stumbled upon a family-run farm and chatted about bulls and cows with Grandpa Vincenzo.
· We got to hang out with fellow Cannuck and one-time neighbour Dirty Beaches and swapped stories about South East Asian touring.
· Every other band at the festival (save the act who will remain unnamed), despite their misgivings, also put their best efforts forth.
Though the pros are less in their numbers, it is wholly impossible to calculate the healing powers of a good swim. It really is. Of course, we’re in this line of work because we LOVE with our full hearts playing music so even when every detail surrounding the performance is tricky, we are driven to make the most of it. And when we boarded the overnight ferry from Ancona to Split, we snuck our bottle of wine to the observatory deck and held each other under the stars and felt very alive and very restored. Exhausted, but alive. And, also, in love.
Pt. 4. This will be the next best day of your life. The summer sunrise was bright and pale. The sea, swollen, weary and motionless, looked colourless against the sky. All became one dazzling un-colour as we entered Croatia in the early hours and the purity of it seemed like a promise: This day will be the next best day of your life. We elbowed our way in for the last of the ships’ espressos and then elbowed our way through the sopping decks, sweating with our gear and luggage, and arrived on the shores of our much beloved Dalmatian coast. The morning was lustrous. I felt transcended by it. Changed internally by its beauty. When the metal-head festival driver arrived, Mazzy Star softly blearing through the blown speakers of his van, we knew we were in the right hands. Seamlessly zipping through the glossy hills and surging through the tunnels from Split to Sibenik, I felt so happy I almost cried. At Solaris Hotel Jure Beach resort, we got a taste of what it must have meant to go on vacation during more communist times. Though the hotel had been re-vamped to accommodate the newly rich tourists of the region (and Russia), many families still arrived in camper vans and set up make-shift summer homes on the same grounds, in a collective style, sharing pots and pans, drying peppers and hanging laundry. A blocky cement jetty jutted out past where the new sand had been shipped in to create more comfortable beach going. Dan’s face lit up: “We could live here baby. You get your ocean and I get my ex-yugoslavia. It’s perfect.” And it’s true, I couldn’t have felt more perfectly at ease. One of our closest friends, Tanja arrives. Having met us in Macedonia before moving to Montreal before moving to Vienna for work and now visiting us here in Croatia we feel lucky to cross such globe-trotting paths so frequently this past year. Tanja has a glorious frankness to her that is so deeply beautiful and womanly and strong that she makes me feel ever more proud to be a broad. I try to mimic it. We get to giggle but also talk about sex and politics and the politics of sex. Within the span of twenty minutes we have discussed police brutality in Montreal and Macedonia, what percentage of penetration allows a person to retain her virginity (if it only goes in 30% is she still chaste?), and then, subsequently, how there is absolutely no such thing as virginity at all and why blow jobs are sacred in Skopje. Needless to say, I’d been right to expect the next best day of my life. After swimming and feasting and spotting a few other international acts in town for the festival (Tanja jokes, “Do you think they’ll think its ‘uncool’ that Handsome Furs are topless and actually having fun?” poking holes through hipsterhood), we make our way to Terraneo. Any one who knows Mate Skugor knows that he is the strongest and most positive force in the music industry of the region, as well as being one of the most genuinely human humans on earth. He has successfully united bands from overseas with local bands and connected to people in Croatia, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Romania, Macedonia and more. He works harder than anyone I know but always always makes the time to share the beauty of his vision. And this festival, its first year in running, has made its home in his hometown of Sibenik on the grounds of an old army barracks. He has curated his favourite musicians and tossed in his favourite food vendors and booze distillers and artists boutiques. It is fucking impressive and so utterly full of heart. Any one who wants to know what his grandpa’s rakja tastes like can have a shot. There is cevapi to boot. And we have arrived just in time to catch the songs of our friends in Bernays Propaganda. We rush to the stage and jump and scream when they notice us. Grga is bouncing around behind us by the time I turn around. And Mate, carrying a hammer and running to fix some part of one of the stages, finds the time to hug us heartily before making everything even more impossibly perfect I’m sure. I am in heaven. And the next friendly face I see is my dear friend Radwan from Montreal, in town much to my great surprise with Suuns. He is backstage commanding what appears to be a push up contest with the boys in the band. I laugh. “This is what happens when there aren’t enough women on tour, right dudes?” They sass back, appropriately good humored. We race between the stages, catching the sets of all the tremendous bands and end the evening watching Suuns as the most impressive technicolour lighting rig casts it’s colours in a 360 degree radius. As Tanja, Radwan, Dan and I scurry through the crowds of drunken happy teenagers, a Sesame Street of recognizable fans and friends stop us for photos and autographs and hugs and I feel so lucky to be loved by so many people in these informal territories. After a sketchy cab ride to the city centre and Stari Grad (the old town), we pass chapels and slip on well-trodden cobblestones, eeking our way through narrow passages and clambering up steps in search of dinner. For many of the restaurants, we have arrived at too late an hour. Each establishment apologizes for having run out of fish for the night. One tightly buttoned restaurateur expresses that there is just “no food left” at all. We begin to realize that Mate’s festival has brought in more folks than the town had prepared to handle and, despite our starvation, we are proud of the success. Finally we find an open terrace and feast on scampi pastas and white fish steaks. Realizing we likely won’t see Radwan before our planned tour to Lebanon in November, he lists all of the things we must see and do in his beloved Beirut. And I truly feel like the luckiest girl in the world to have so many friends in so many places. We taxi back to our respective hotels and sleep, covered in sun and salt and sweat. My happiest slumbers.
The next day wind storms delay soundchecks but the festival staff is prepared to battle the gales. They do so with gutsy and breezy attitudes and with gusto. They have chained the PA systems and covered the stages with large tarps and everything goes off without a hitch – and nothing gets unhitched in the process. We feel wholly taken care of. As friends in Xa Xa Xa, Destroyer, Crystal Castles and contemporaries in The National, Mogwai, Liars, Janelle Monae and Repititor brave the winds we all share our stories of meeting Mate, with great pride. This is why we all do what we do. We make music because it is the only thing we know how to do well or want to do well and we gain our joy from being able to share it with the people who most care about it, including promoters and friends and fans who all put their hearts in as equally as we do. It is the best feeling in the world when it works out in this way. Dan and I watch Serbian band Repetitor and feel blown away. They are young and driven and brave. And they are immense. We search for them back stage to hug them and share our respect before we ready ourselves for our own set. After watching both The National and Crystal Castles perform, we take stage at nearly three in the morning. The thousands of devoted music enthusiasts and addicts swarm to our stage. It is one of the most meaningful concerts of my life. For all the right reasons. Mate, we owe you so much and Croatia, you know you have our hearts. You gave me truly, two of the best days of my life, full of heroic energy and passion. Life is hard but if you work hard at what you love, it can feel pretty dang beautiful. I feel, in the very marrow of my bones, something deeper than I can make sense of but I know it is the essence of who I am – and why I am who I am. How does one go about paying gratitude for giving me my most self? I am humbled.
Pt. 5. Croatia. Montenegro. Bosnia-Herzegovina. Albania. Kosovo. Macedonia. With no other band have we crossed more borders in one day. A few months ago we had the supreme luxury of touring with Bernays Propaganda through the Balkan region and in the span of that week long tour we crossed a lot of borders. So it is with great pride that I can say, we crossed them all again in one day. It might have been the longest drive of my entire life – I finished another Italo Svevo novel – but it was made lovely by fruit stands and smoke breaks and singing and discourse on books and music and the meaning of life. It was made unforgettable by the coastline we followed – the most breathtaking vistas I have ever witnessed. It was made hilarious by surly and friendly customs officers. And when we took our sore asses out of the van to stretch, we were the lucky recipients of a meteor shower. I looked up as all the lights descended and couldn’t remember what country we were in. I just felt joy. To me, a key signifier to any good city is what food items are available at 4:30 am. Sick with tuckeredness, but made “home” safe in Skopje, Tanja takes us passed two different late night stalls – still open – to introduce us to her favourite kiosk. We scarf down sausage rolls and these pastries stuffed with sweet chopped pork and down a bottle of wine before we literally crawl into freshly laid sheets and fall so swiftly asleep I can’t remember taking my clothes off.
Pt. 6. 7. 8. coming soon.