Life is Good on the Open Road

I quit the band, got an ulcer, and learned the hard way

In 2016 I felt like I was in the middle of an acre of quicksand. I was in the midst of a divorce, I was on the road all the time, I couldn’t write a song to save my life, and our band’s career felt like it was losing steam for its first time. I was flat burnt out on touring, yet all I seemed to do was tour. I was not sleeping well or often. With my usual emotional outlet (songwriting) not working, I decided to carve out a little time for a songwriting retreat. I wanted to get away from anything to do with city life, the music business, and lawyers. As Edward Abbey put it in Desert Solitaire, I wanted to “evade for a while the clamor and filth and confusion of the cultural apparatus.” I rented a cabin in far northern Minnesota and hid out for a little while with a guitar and an old Marantz cassette field recorder. The tactic worked and I snowshoed out of that place with a handful of new songs. I felt almost recovered. The only problem was I had no interest in recording these songs with Trampled by Turtles.