I’ve never been a touring musician. The closest I’ve come to this was the Summer of 2015 when I worked at Ticketfly and worked on-site at festivals pretty much all Summer. That being said, I’m very prone to car sickness, which would make me an awful bandmate. When I first learned about Taste In Music: Eating On Tour with Indie Musicians, I honestly was expecting a bit of a horror novel, as, well, low-budget touring across America sounds like an experience in a LOT of risky gas station meals.
The good news: I was wrong about it being a detailed diary of pickles in frightening, vaguely erotic cartoon packaging and tube meat. Instead, it was a fascinating look at how one can tour, with the slog of touring on a budget, and find joy in food out on the road. Alex Bleeker and Luke Pyenson make for great narrators and interviewers. They both express a deep love of food and enjoy adventurous eating. The book is formatted in three sections- the first is about getting fed at shows—and the second is about finding food that’s both nutritious and gratifying while traveling between bands. The last is about having a relationship with food, keeping your identity and holding on to yourself during this time. The format? It was a mix of short essays and interviews with both young and old indie acts, smaller stars and bigger stars, and there’s even a very G-rated mention of a Diddy Party from a former member of Danity Kane, which predates the current newsfeed but was weirdly nice to uncover.
The book was a captivating read from beginning to end. I found it highly relatable to read about the inconsistency of festival catering. During my 2015 “tour,” nothing compared to how excellent the catering was at Tortuga in Fort Lauderdale. I looked forward to every meal, and the chef made sure to talk to everyone, from Zac Brown himself to the team running the box office, to ensure we all had something we could eat. It felt odd to see that Phoebe Bridgers has a chef who tours with her since it seemed that was out of reach to everyone else in this book. I learned that touring Europe is MUCH nicer than touring the US. And, as expected, being vegan on the road was awful in the 90s, and the veggie patty at Subway is not vegan.
Taste In Music: Eating On Tour with Indie Musicians is out now on Chronicle Books, just in time for the holidays. Seriously, this book is great. It made me very, very hungry, but it didn’t make me want to start a touring band.
