The Spanish room

Songs travel fine. Nobody needs a translation of a guitar. We have played rooms in towns where I could not order lunch and the songs landed exactly the same as they land in Austin, because thats what songs do.

Where it falls apart is the talking. And I did not understand for a long time how much of a show is the talking. The little story before the sad one. The bit about the drummer's van. Telling people what the next song is about and why we wrote it in a motel outside Lubbock. That is the part that turns a crowd into a room, and for about half the people in front of us that part was just noise with a friendly tone.

You can see it. Theres a lag. English speakers laugh, and then a half second later the rest of the room laughs a little bit too, at the laughing, because they are being polite. Fifteen years I watched that happen and figured thats just how it is.

We started running the pass on these dates mostly for the money reason and the translation was honestly an afterthought — it was there, we turned it on, whatever. Then in Del Rio we are on stage and I am doing the bit about the van and I hear the laugh come from the whole room at once. Not the polite half second later laugh. The actual one. Because a third of the people in that room had earbuds in listening in Spanish and they got the joke when I told it, not when everybody else reacted to it.

I got kind of emotional about it which is embarassing to admit in writing. But that is a thing I had been doing badly for fifteen years and did not have any way to fix, and it turned out the fix was a checkbox.

What happened after is the part the business people care about. Merch that night was the best we have ever done in that town by a wide margin, and I dont think it is complicated why — people buy a shirt from a band they feel like they met, not from a band they watched. Next time through, the room was fuller. The time after that we moved to the bigger venue. I am not going to pretend one feature did all of that, we also just kept showing up. But we had been showing up for years and the graph did not bend until the talking started landing in both languages.