Touring

Career wise, staying on the road is hard sometimes. There is nothing that is a true struggle. Being professional each night is a challenge at times. On nights when I don't really feel like playing making no one notice that. Other than that, eating well and staying healthy is a struggle.

JM: I miss the community. It’s a great community when you’re touring. I don’t miss it right now to be honest, though. I’m more looking forward to going back to LA and finishing up my record. Basically, my schedule is to finish up my record and put it away and then go into training for this Trio tour, which we're going to do in the fall. I have to get back in shape as a guitar player. It’s going to be a lot of guitar playing. For me, if I went out on the road right now to do the Trio tour, I don’t think I’d have the stamina to do it.

RT: Life on the road, it has to be—here you're pretty much home. It's a lousy, miserable day. You can come up and hang with us, and then you play tomorrow.

Is there ever getting used to living out of a suitcase?

JM: Yeah. You can do.

RT: Do you ever prefer it? Do you like the escape?

JM: No. But more than ever—because it's summer time I think, there's nothing else. If I were to stay home—everyone is so kind of kinetic and moving around anyway, that I'm actually doing what everyone else is doing for the summer. It's very comforting for me for two months to do what everyone else—everyone else is traveling. If I went home everyone I'd want to see would be traveling. So it's actually really fun for me on this tour to want to be out there—I'm actually having a better time on the road. So I do change my answer, I'm having a better time on the road than at home now.

SS: So you're going to be performing the day your album is released. Have you ever put on a show on a release day before?

JM: I think we did that on Continuum. The show at Roseland. The great part about going out on a new tour and having a new record out is that you sort of relieve the other tunes of their duty and having to be the record that you have out. It's almost like I can take the songs from Continuum now and repurpose them in other ways because they're not on deck. It's going to be fun. Nobody wants to come to the show and hear "Waiting on the World to Change" or "Say" the way that it was performed on the record. So it's really fun, you get to play new songs and you get to repurpose the old ones so that they're new.

PD: So are you reshuffling your live band?

JM: Not completely. But not just a different personnel lineup, but for me I think it’s a different approach to playing live music. I think one thing I would love to do away with is to kind of get rid of this imaginary “Wrap it up” light in my head when it comes to playing songs. You know, extend it if you still want to express yourself. If you still want to simmer on something, just do it. And change things up. Don’t be afraid if the crowd didn’t cheer as loud for the last song as you wanted them to. You don’t have to call an audible and change your set list. It’s all right, it’s OK.

BB: What is your day like? Cause you wake up at what time? Touring.

JM: Depending on the time zone, anywhere between 10 [AM] to noon.

BB: And you do what when you wake up?

JM: I dive into the excitement of the day via Instagram, Twitter, text, email. And I do—I go around and around for like an hour. You know like—I was thinking of this literally yesterday—if you want to offend most of the world with how good you have life you wouldn’t talk about how much money you have, you would talk about how you haven’t been underslept in like months.

[Laughs]

You could say like, Yeah I have a G4 jet. People would be like, Yeah good for you, you be like, I haven’t woken up tired in a month, people would be like, How dare you?!

So I don’t really wake up tired. I just wake up at whatever time my body says to wake up.

BB: So no alarm clock?

JM: No.

Amy: That’s amazing.

BB: You wake up whenever your eyes open?

JM: Yeah. It’s the only way to do this for a living. The only way to do it for a living is sleep has to come first. Sleep is like water if you’re in the survivalism of it. You have to have sleep. I quit drinking, so I don’t have to deal with hangovers. And I’m a dangerous man without a hangover.

So this is like what I try to explain to my friends is that when you come off tour it's a little—your brain is mush because you begin to have a kind of a Stockholm Syndrome with your hotel room. Like have you ever done a gig where you were motivated by going back to your room?
 
DD: Oh, 100%.
 
JM: It's the weirdest thing in the world, right? Because here's the thing you gave your entire life to do and all you're thinking about is: I can't wait to get back into sweatpants and climb into bed and play on my phone and I have another eighteen hours to myself.

One of my least favorite things to do is play a city and sleep there. There's something hard for me—I never do after-shows in a city I've just played in. It just feels like the mission is accomplished.

But then like now I'm playing on stage in front of more people than I've ever played in front of playing really pretty stuff and I feel like, Oh, it was good to invest in pretty. You just wear it, you wear all of it. Your first record, your second record, all the records. You just, you know, it's hard to explain. I'm one guy. I'm not eight records. I’m just one guy. I've made records.