As I write this, Joel and I are on a westbound desert freeway some 300 miles outside of Los Angeles. We have played the final show on our tour and are headed back to where we started from two months ago.
After being gone for so long and being so far away from everything familiar and everyday, both loved and despised, it feels a bit strange to know that tomorrow I’ll wake up in my bed and make some breakfast in my kitchen, just like I have hundreds of times before, rather than waking up in a van outside of some unfamiliar city where there is not much of anything for certain except that Joel and I will be playing a show somewhere that night.
With so much lead up, so many hopes and so much effort having gone into this tour, along with the uncertainty and upheaval that came with us refusing to back down from carrying out our plan to tour within a year of when we finished our EP, as it got underway it was easy to think that there was no need to worry about what was on the other side, since there was no way of even knowing what that could be, as if a huge black void, or the edge of the world, waited for us at the end of the tour. No matter what happened, I suppose I knew I was headed back to LA when it was over, at least for awhile. But now as we drive closer and closer, I feel strangely scared, for the first time ever, perhaps, of everything the city of Los Angeles has become to me, and wish that right this moment I could more definitively say that in the semi-imaginary battle between Joel and I and the city of Los Angeles that we had emerged victorious.
All of that aside, this tour has opened doors for us that seemed quite hopelessly locked just a few months ago, and we already have another tour of North America in the works for this summer, so I’m sure we’ll soon be so busy working on what comes next that I won’t have much time to be nervous.
So here you are, more photos from The Violet Lights’ 2012 North American Tour… part I.
