The great American overnight Greyhound

For a creative non-fiction podcast project earlier this year, I wrote about Greyhound buses and the twenty hours I spent on one in the summer of 2017. You can hear my dulcet tones below, if you're so inclined.

"Greyhound buses carry so much irresistible cultural baggage - at least for non-Americans travelling America. Robert Johnson's 'old evil spirit' gets a Greyhound bus and rides. Kerouac, face a bus window blur, juts his bottom lip over a notebook. Cowboy Joe Buck, transistor radio in hand, travels from Texas to New York City looking for a better life. Simon & Garfunkel's Cathy is looking for America, with a pack of cigarettes and Mrs Wagner's pies, 'laughing on the bus, playing games with the faces'. And when you ride a Greyhound bus in real life, it's the faces that stay with you ..."

Springsteen on Broadway: it's just the working, the working, the working life

LIKE AMERICA, like most things in life, there’s an easy, surface-level reading of Bruce Springsteen: stars-and-stripes thick-necked denim-clad bombastic muscle bro - looked kind of dorky before the 80s - who sings about blue-collar workers and cars and chasing girls on Friday nights. Dad-rock alert! But when you really listen to him, read about him, see him sweat before your eyes, that image explodes into multiple layers, as complex as the country he sings about.

Springsteen on Broadway is a fast-track to exploding those layers, the myth laid bare under industrial stage light. The performance makes sense of the feelings his music and live shows give you. On Broadway, Springsteen songs feel like museum exhibits, not in a dull dusty way, but in how he exposes each song on stage, vulnerable, stripped and examined from all angles. Songs as exhibits, until he rattles their bones out to the audience, and builds something new but not-new out of them. The Promised Land, a-capella. The gutsy blues of Born in the USA, how’d Reagan like the sound of that now, anger in plain sight.

I didn’t think I needed Broadway Bruce, thought I knew it all already: the names of his aunts, the shapes of his demons, the way his hometown smells in August rain and November snow. I’d watched him read from his autobiography in a San Francisco theatre in 2016, and wondered if I’d be in for a similar experience. The cynic in me thought the whole venture was easy money.

Well, there was nothing recycled about this experience. And money, yes, but easy? Fuck no. ‘I’ve never worked five days a week - until right now,’ Springsteen says during the show. ‘I don’t like it.’ His point is that as a lifelong musician, he’s completely unqualified to sing about working-class labour, the factory life that's defined both the generation of his time and the main thrust of his music. But his remark is also a nod to the show’s imperceptible toil. Five performances, five days a week, 236 shows in total (a run longer than any Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band tour): seventeen songs laced together with a tight script, over and over, week in week out. This is a kind of strenuous repetition that also belongs to the factory line, and it’s therefore reasonable to consider Springsteen on Broadway as his own warped version of factory work.

But Springsteen’s not mass-producing anything material. On stage, over and over again in factory style, he perpetuates his own mythology – that blue-collar easy read - even as he works to dismantle it.

Flying to NYC

This is how to pass the time when you are swooping over the Atlantic for a date with Bruce Springsteen. I like fonts.

Jukebox babe mix 1

California, month nine | once it's gone it's gone

It is almost fitting to write so long after the fact. It felt as unreal then as it does now, seventeen months later. My final weeks in Berkeley went by so fast I was never able to get a hold of them. The morning after spring break, I walked across Sproul Plaza to return a sleeping bag to the camping society. New summer sun slung through the trees, and it dawned on me that soon I was going to leave this place for good.

How to begin to say goodbye to a temporary home? How to define it, file it away within your personal narrative? Berkeley was a microcosm of existence, the gleam of which would slowly fade from real life until the year became a boxed up, sealed, separate thing. Amid the tumult of those April weeks I sought moments to breathe the unique Berkeley smell the last few times. I wrote down songs on torn napkins, strange notes in my phone. Remember it, remember it, remember everything. I felt so alive in this shining place it was inconceivable that I should have ever to leave.

It was not the final goodbye: that would come three weeks later, messily, sobbing in the back of a rental car down Highway 1.

But it was goodbye to a way of life that would never be recreated, to a certain time and feeling and group of people: goodbye to iced coffee and walking to class in a sweet pine haze and basement hangouts and early coffee shop shifts, to gigs and bars and breweries, to dad dancing, and the strongest smell of spring I've ever known, and the same songs on repeat, and feeling it all, every aching second of it.

Between returning the sleeping bag that sunny morning, though, and the final 'proper' night in Berkeley when we climbed the Big C with beer to watch the sun set and the Bay glitter, there was work to be done.

The heaviest study workload of my life plays out against Berkeley's sweet late spring, the kind of season that assaults all five senses with its paradisal colour and heady scent. Daily life is a monotonous whirlwind of study, coffee, sun: there is paper after paper to write, and finals week looms uglily. Campus turns a delicate bright green. My head is consumed with revision.

I'm writing a paper on Springsteen's 1978 song Racing in the Street for my American music class. Greil Marcus, longtime music writer and my professor, invites me to his office to talk Bruce, which I do, and he asks me for a personal copy of my paper when it's done, and afterwards I walk down through North Side, head spinning, thinking how lucky I am to have found something I love without question, how all other life choices pale in comparison to this subtle art of talking about music, how crazy it is to get writing advice and encouragement from Greil, and then to step outside into California - California! - and walk under palm trees, and see the Bay glow ahead... all of it feels so right, and I'm determined to learn how to hold on to it.

Early one evening I change into a navy dress after an afternoon studying in the sun, and meet some friends down in the BART station. The sky is orange as we glide across the Bay into the city. In the Fillmore foyer are baskets of shiny red apples. I've heard things about these apples, and the legendary free posters after every Fillmore gig, and the chandeliers that dot the wide dark ceiling. We're here to see Laura Marling play: a most un-American gig, except that she lived in Los Angeles for a while and probably knows how it feels to interrupt Californian air with British tones. I forget how nice it is to hear those tones. I forget how quietly powerful her music is, and how much I listened to her in Bloomsbury in early 2015, hunting for cracks in the winter grey. And now I am at the Fillmore, San Francisco, California, USA, listening to this translucent figure with a guitar. I've swapped Bloomsbury for Berkeley, a London winter for Californian sun, quietness for happiness. Laura Marling reminds me of how things used to be, of an old self, of London, and of how damn good this year abroad has been to me.

we've been riding up mountains / turning corners in our lives
we would have taken any buses headed for Telluride
but we stopped in the desert in the middle of the night
and looked to the stars from the old roadsides
you looked at me and said / look at the moon, take it in, it will be gone soon
I'm taking more risks now / I'm stepping out of line
I put up my fists now until I get what's mine

One weekend the Summer of Love Festival comes to town. It's a hot day, one of the first. On Telegraph Avenue a long-haired band play from a camper van, and next to the poetry corner a funky wizard offers tarot readings. Later that day I do my American taxes and book a flight home to London in three months time, and feel conflicted about my identity. Suddenly all is tinged with finality.

In the evening we attend an outdoor sunset viewing of the Festival Express documentary. The sidewalk is warm on my bare legs, and there's Janis and The Band and The Flying Burrito Bros, and rock and roll is here to stay. Afterwards, I pack a year's worth of belongings to send back to London. It is satisfying to offload 20kg of winter layers just as the American summer begins, my possessions shrunk down to a backpack quantity I know I'll be sick of come August. As I fold clothes and wrap souvenirs I play The Band's version of I Shall Be Released: I see my light come shining / From the west down to the east... 

Finals week strikes with bright perfect heat. It's May now, May 2017, the end-date I've written so many times on visa forms and school paperwork. We coffee-shop-hop in a last study scramble. On Tuesday, Greil Marcus emails with feedback on my Springsteen paper. He calls me a writer. We work outside at Elmwood's Cole Coffee, my friends and I, living off bagels and peanut butter pretzels and chocolate malt balls from the Safeway across the street. Sometimes we work from the benches in the temporary English department on campus - the professors moan it's a tin shed compared to Wheeler Hall, which is unluckily being renovated the whole time I'm studying English at Berkeley - but I kind of like the tin shed, with its purple doors and yellow windowsills and stainless steel, its daisied grass and poppies.

Walking home one evening, C and I talk about how everything seems beautiful again now it's hot and our departure is imminent. A year is a strange amount of time to be displaced somewhere new, we decide, because a year is so short in the context of our life, yet still a substantial amount of time, and yeah, we go home and eat and shower and write.

I finish an English paper in a single day, first at Cole Coffee, and later when the heat drops a little, on my bottom bunk bed. I lie on my stomach in my bra, typing words about the American landscapes of Flannery O'Connor. The blue sky deepens outside. The fan whirs. I stop writing and try to hold the moment. That night, after submitting the paper, I watch American Honey and begin a love affair with Mazzy Star's Fade Into You, a song that exactly fits my sunset-tinged life here.

All my final exams, nine hours worth, happen in one head-blurred rush on Thursday. For the last exam, American music, I write about Bob Dylan's Masters of War, which kind of sums up the way Berkeley life feels like a constant exam and a constant holiday at the same time. Then I step out of the emptying lecture hall into a cloudy day. I feel surreal: my academic life at Berkeley is over, and somehow I only have a handful of days left of this dreamy California existence.

we've not got long you know
to bask in the afterglow
once it's gone it's gone

Don't tell my mom

Songs for a Bristol road-trip on a sunny October morning. The kind of journey you don't forget in a hurry.

'All the way along the motorway large sweeps of birds gathered themselves above the trees for their long journey someplace warm.'

'It was sunny now and the motorway looked beautiful, cutting across wide fields under a blue sky. It was my turn to play music. I knew if there was something I could do well, even if I wasn’t a good talker, it was to make a good playlist.'

'I thought about that Rob Sheffield quote. "There is nowhere else I could imagine wanting to be besides here in this car, with this girl, on this road, listening to this song. If she breaks my heart, no matter what hell she puts me through, I can say it was worth it, just because of right now. Out the window is a blur and all I can really hear is this girl’s hair flapping in the wind, and maybe if we drive fast enough the universe will lose track of us and forget to stick us somewhere else."'