All That Matters

Tonight we played the Saratoga Performing Arts Center (SPAC), a famously beautiful venue surrounded by forest and trails and things that make you feel like you’re not on tour, at least for a moment. 

I run into a bunch of our touring party on my pre-soundcheck constitutional, all of us breathing deep in wistful remembrance of decadences like king-sized beds and not brewing coffee at 70mph. It’s an odd life we’ve chosen.

I like what Johnny Rzeznik said tonight while introducing “Name,” how when he wrote the song in some shitty attic apartment in Buffalo almost 30 years ago, after a decade of dogging it in the van, it wasn’t about money or fame - those had long become abstractions. “If I don’t have something to say, just to share as an artist, I’m done.” 

A rockstar dream, suffocated and moribund, becomes a desire simply to contribute, in some humble way, to the thing you love. 

And that, it turns out, is all that matters.