Big E, Little E, Pseudo E
I know the internet has been around for awhile, but this is the first time I've ever felt any significant impact from it upon my own shows and tours.
A case in point: at Wednesday's show in Pittsburgh, to my astonishment, "the kids" started singing along to "democracy, whisky, sexy," which I had just written and "released" last week. Now, these were not casual listeners, but rather the sort of diehard fans who you'd expect to make an effort to hear the current thing. Still I think that's quite fast for a song to enter the audience sing-along repertoire. It's unique in my experience, anyway.
It would be wrong of me to mention Pittsburgh and fail to note the earnestly over-the-top young enthusiast named Mike who brought his whole family to the show, including his mom and I believe a few cousins. He saw himself as a kind of ambassador of Pittsburgh and his portfolio appeared to include keeping everyone well supplied with a local beer called Iron City. It comes in brown plastic bottles. If you saw me play at the Sidewalk in New York the next day, and noticed a wan, uneasy bearing and a slightly distant look in my eyes, Mike and his bottles are probably partially to blame. Thanks, Mike. Go Steelers.
I don't know how common this is for other guys in bands, but after a typical show, several kids will hand you little folded up pieces of paper on their way out. They're basically little thank you notes, containing things they'd be too embarrassed to say, perhaps, or things they felt they might not have a chance to mention in post show autograph/photo op. confusion. Sometimes these notes have been written hastily during the show; others have been laboriously prepared beforehand (in Trig study period, no doubt), decorated with little pictures and stickers. They're often creatively punctuated, hearts, circles, x's, etc. Sometimes all the a's have little circles drawn around them. Occasionally the contents have a strange, indescribable, off the wall charm; for example, I once got one with what looked like a sketch of some kind of monkey along with text that read "P.S. I'm sure you have better things to do with your time, but I thought you might be interested in this picture of my dog that I drew in Social Studies. P.S.S. Her name is Dave..."
Some things never change I guess. Kids still communicate by passing notes to each other, like they did when I was in school. And they're basically the same kind of notes. The weird thing is, circumstances have arranged themselves so that I'm still getting them.
They can be silly, funny, retarded, or barely intelligible, but they can also be thoughtful and poignant-- you'd be surprised at how many of these notes are genuinely touching. And on rare occasions, the contents will conjure a moment of pure poetry. I received my favorite one of all time the other day. Here's an excerpt:
Here is something to make your ego expand ten dress sizes-- you are my own pseudo Elvis Costello.