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Some people keep a notebook. As a musician, I keep a very long list
I am an inveterate list maker. Books, flights, podcasts, TV shows. I write them down, tiny morsels of a life — each entry triggering a small memory or a flicker of a moment long-passed. More than 20 years ago, when I started my contorted, blissful journey as a performing musician, I began keeping a list of all the shows I have played, along with their setlists. As of last week, that list surpasses 900.
It’s a number that at once fills me with astonishment and woe. Nice, for sure, to spend so much time doing something one loves. Terrifying to think of what one may have given up in order to keep doing it. This recent milestone, along with some others (having a child, welcoming another very soon) got me thinking back on why I started this list in the first place — and what, if anything, it means to keep it.
It began at a high school graduation party.
It was for my friend Pat’s older sister, so my bandmates and I set up in his parents’ living room among his sister’s friends and relatives and did what high school bands do — we jammed. We played a few tunes from John Scofield’s funk/jazz classic “A Go Go,” Sony Rollins’ “Tenor Madness,” and, being good young Dead Heads, “Friend of the Devil.”
When I got home, I created a Word document and typed out the date (June 22, 2002), the location (Pat’s House, Andover, Mass.) and the songs we played. I aimed to emulate my heroes, like The Grateful Dead and The Allman Brothers Band; bands where every show was faithfully catalogued, annotated and analyzed by diehard fans. Lacking said diehards, I became keeper of my own vault.
It has been a quietly consistent part of my life ever since, a diary in shorthand. I return home from a show or a tour, open up that ever-lengthening Word document and log the shows. Each entry consists of the same components — name of venue, name of city, other bands on the bill and list of songs played. Occasional notations are made for things like special guests sitting in, but for the most part the set list archive is just that — a list. Quiet, unassuming, egalitarian and unmistakably there.
The list starts with a band made up of my high school friends, who have gone on to their own estimable success in music. Then it grows to encompass other projects — full band shows, solo sets, sit-ins, a few weddings and other various ephemera of a life of semi-professionalism: a few record label showcases that went nowhere; a Daytrotter session (long live Daytrotter!); and more recently a few Irish sessions as a result of my wife’s family’s deep history with traditional Irish music. For the last decade, most of the entries are from shows with the Berkshires-based songwriter project The Whiskey Treaty Roadshow , which I founded with four other friends and songwriters in 2014 and has taken on a bit of a life of its own — its longevity and success as surprising to me as anyone.
All told there are shows played in 27 states and an average of about 40 per year. The list remains a Word document, and a quick “find” function review shows some of the cities that I’ve played the most (Brooklyn - 100, Cambridge - 78) and others with less frequency (Philadelphia - 9, Los Angeles - 3, Milwaukee - 1). By my recollection, that last one was a food co-op that forgot we were coming and made us set up on the sidewalk.
If there was a microphone or a few people in the room and it felt real enough, it goes into the list.
There are memories of funny times (a Red Sox pitcher from the '80s grooving out when we played a fan fest for the Triple-A All-Star Game in Providence), times lost to memory (a 2006 entry from a show in Brattleboro, Vermont says someone I have no memory of, named “Nashville Nick,” sat in on guitar), and times that simply cannot be described here (a night opening for Blues Traveler in 2018 that I will tell you about if you'll give me your in-person, undivided attention for approximately two hours).
Of those 900 shows, perhaps 300 or so are triumphant — national festivals, esteemed rock clubs, packed houses and calls for encores at places I always dreamed of playing.
Another 300 are nightmares: no one comes. Someone in the band has a meltdown. Or I simply play so badly I promise myself I will never go through the humiliation of doing it again.
And another 300 are somewhere in the middle: an ordinary gig in an ordinary place that wasn’t packed but wasn’t empty, where the band plays pretty well, loads out and moves onto the next one.
Every once in a while, I open the archive to a random page and find a little remembrance from the past.
May 9, 2003 - Olde Town Hall, Andover, Mass.: A night with my best friends at our hometown venue opening for early 2000s jam scene legends The Slip (if you know you know). I swear, if at that moment, at that time of our lives, you had asked if we would rather open for Led Zeppelin at Madison Square Garden or The Slip, we would have picked The Slip.
August 22, 2008 - Bella Dubby, Lakewood, Ohio: For reasons lost to history, our folk band was last on a bill of electronic drone musicians at a now long-closed Cleveland-area club. We played our first notes and the heretofore-packed club emptied immediately.
November 16, 2013 - Pete’s Candy Store, Brooklyn, New York: A show with a collection of songwriters from Massachusetts that seemed like a fun one-night-only gig. It turned into a 10-year odyssey with people who have become some of my closest friends.
April 25, 2014 - The Middle East Upstairs, Cambridge, Mass.: I met my roommate’s girlfriend’s friend in between sets the night of the album release show for a solo album I made. We talked for about 10 minutes and she left just before the encore, which — according to the archive — was a cover of “I’ve Got My Mind Set On You,” by George Harrison. Eventually she heard it though. I played it five years later, dedicated to her, at our wedding.
What constitutes a “show”? It’s loose. An open mic night when I was just starting out holds the same weight as a sold-out night at Club Passim or the Iron Horse Music Hall. If there was a microphone or a few people in the room and it felt real enough, it goes into the list. The mundane and the sacred, the ordinary and the profound. Who can argue? It’s my list.
Why is it so important to me to write this all down in a document no one has ever seen? In “On Keeping a Notebook,” the great Joan Didion wrote, “we are all well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not.”
I feel like we are all well served by remaining on those nodding terms, whether it’s by keeping a diary, staring up at the bedroom window of an old apartment or looking back over a list of old concerts long forgotten.
Sometimes I open the document and take a nostalgic stroll down memory lane. More often I come face to face with some frightening chapter of my former self: a teenager awkwardly bantering into the mic filled with feigned self-confidence; a flannel-clad 20-something in a newsboy cap, cosplaying a character from a Kerouac novel. Sometimes my nagging insecurities leap off the page at me: shouldn’t someone who has spent this much time doing something be further along by this point? Where, if anywhere, is it all going?
Other times I catch a glimpse of a young person filled with passion, trying to connect, slowly but surely getting better at their craft, watching a messy but purposeful life take shape.
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