Hello, I'm Stereochemistry

acoustic guitar female hand mallet black and white

There's a few things that unwinding from a tour usually brings up, for many of us touring musos that feed off the life on the road.

Road days are a carrousel ride on their own, an amusement park where the exchange is intense, nights are short and personal hygiene and sleep among the least of priorities. Cables, adapters and tuners are more important than any shower under the sun. The unspoken interplay of emotions, sounds, and overall euphoria between you and the crowd and the occasional tourmates takes you whole and makes for an universe of its own.

Countless hours on trains and busses gift us with times to deflate, summon up new ideas that constantly keep popping up in such intense environment, and well, have the best excuse ever for not being reachable around the clock, 24/7 through wifi's and social networks. It is all a rush, that pure getting high on life itself thing. You give it all you've got and it consumes you; yet you consume it as well and feed off it all... the mix of old faces and new, the most improbable sleeping arrangements, the occasional last-minute dramas and sinister technical solutions...

...and then the last chord is played, the last bow taken and the last train is hopped, you are back into the four walls of your home, with a tricky task to reintegrate back into your (normal) everyday life - even though there is little to none normality in it, anyway. It is as if someone would pull a plug in your brain right at the peak of the orgasm and you're left there, unable to take it all in, while the wave of travel intertia breaks over your head and tumbles you down in its good ole dark whirlpool.

So you find yourself there, at the bottom of the well known black pit that is cosy enough to feel like home, yet uncomfortable enough to feel the need to swim up and gasp for air.

Then you see that despite all your freedom, you are nothing but an addict...

... but then I look at those six strings and those four strings and those eighty-eight keys, I look at them, two five-fingered spindly stars attached to wrists way too narrow for their size, I think of where they were, of everything that they have touched, twisted, strummed, changed, done...

...and I smile because I am addicted to the most beautiful thing in the world.