It’s August 2023 and I’m sitting in the airport waiting for my flight to Vancouver. I’m on my way to visit friends I haven’t seen since this time last year – a trip I took to help me process my father’s sudden passing – and am catching my breath after a second unexpected gate change that’s seen me and dozens of others make a frantic dash across the airport.
I’m checking my phone for the twelfth time to make sure I haven’t, somehow, inexplicably, deleted my ticket. Did I check for it three minutes ago? Yes. Could my phone have mysteriously wiped all my files in that time despite being locked? Yes, and that’s a reasonable concern to have (source: anxiety).
It’s while doing this that I see I have an Instagram notification from Urban Heat. If you aren’t familiar, they’re a post-punk synthwave band from Austin, Texas, and happen to be playing in Vancouver the night after I arrive.
Now, a notification from them isn’t in itself unusual right now. We’ve fallen into a rhythm, their account and mine, where I post my daily “countdown to the show” story, and they share it to theirs. It is reasonable to assume that’s what the notification is, and I’m already smiling because it has become a neat little part of my day.
It’s not that. It’s a DM.
“Oh my god!” I exclaim loudly, causing several people to glance over at me. Understandable, that tone of shock isn’t necessarily what you want to hear right before getting on a plane.
Now, there’s some important context: two weeks before getting on this flight, I wrote an article about the band. I had seen them perform back in March, and wrote about how the presence of vocalist Jonathan Horstmann both on and off-stage really struck me. As well as how I, generally, related to some of my favourite songs.
I’d reshared the article earlier that day. My idea – my big idea – was that maybe they’d see it before the Vancouver show, and when I went to go pick up the crop top the guys were bringing up for me (remember the Reaper crop tops? Canadian shipping wasn’t an option at the time and they very kindly offered to bring the shirt to Vancouver with them), I could slide in a “ohhhh by the way thanks for sharing what I wrote!”
That’s as far and as big as my idea went.
Well, ideas have a way of escaping you. Or maybe the universe sees things you don’t. Whatever the framing, it brings us back to the message.
“We saw the article you wrote and it’s clear to us you’re the perfect person to write copy for us. We’d like to hire you to rewrite our bio, would you be interested?”
Oh. My. God.
Yeah? Yeah! Yes, I’m interested. So interested!
I don’t know if I sounded collected in my reply. I know I mentioned that I was about to get on a plane (like, sent that as I was in line to board “about to get on”) and so wouldn’t be able to answer further for a bit. My intention had been to sleep during the flight – that didn’t happen. What did happen was that I read the article again and again, trying to pinpoint what it was that had dropped this opportunity in my lap.
It has been ten months since then, and thinking back on this still makes me smile. What a cool interaction.
The show in Vancouver was brilliant, and after all was said and done I made my way over to the merch table where Jonathan and I got talking about this writing. I left that conversation energized, excited, and ready to immediately set to work. There was just the minor issues of me being in Vancouver, BC being on fire, and the airport I was supposed to be flying into the next day being closed. That’s a whole other story.
Fastforward to December and while the bio had not been written (maybe one day part of that email chain will see the light of day, I had fun with it), I’d conducted an interview with Jonathan via email around the release of Urban Heat’s single “Like This.” I thought it went well, and knew the group was going to be back in town during their Winter tour, so asked if there would be interest in meeting for a sit-down interview. There was immediate interest! In the course of planning when exactly it would happen, I offered to help out with merch in Philly, New Jersey and New York. You can read about those shows here.
I made the offer because I wanted the chance to speak with other fans, and use those insights to inform how I approached writing their bio. I also, very conveniently, had (and still have!) friends in two of those cities whose couches I could crash on for a few days in order to save on hotel costs. Thank you friends made through World of Warcraft, of all places!
The interview went great. It was my first time doing one, ever. I was terribly nervous – it showed – but I’d also done my research and knew my questions were interesting. The shows I did merch for went great. We scheduled a follow-up interview at the end of December and, somewhere in the course of all this, I was given tour dates for Spring. Which got my wheels turning: what if I did merch for part of that tour. What if I did that, and did a sort of unofficial tour journal thing? I pitch it. Jonathan thinks it’s a very cool idea, and so we start planning for me to join the band for 10 days of their Spring 2024 tour.
Right before I leave there’s a lot of last minute chaos, and somewhere in there it turns out I’m no longer writing the bio, but oh well, I’ll live, I’m going on tour with the band!
When I tell you this was my dream as a teenager I’m not even a little bit exaggerating. I’d be avoiding people by hanging out in the basement amongst all the forgotten furniture, listening to my music much too loud, singing, and dreaming about some hazy future time where I’d be on tour. Not as a musician, that was never the interest, but I wanted to be involved somehow and knew other people were needed for things! I accepted pretty quickly – for a teen – that this was never going to happen, but it’s good to have dreams.
And incredible to get to live them out.
Which brings us to March 2024 and me getting on a plane to Florida in order to spend two days getting acclimated to a ridiculous change in temperature – and picking up an awful sunburn in the process – before joining Urban Heat on tour.
It’s an incredible ten days – I met so many people, and made so many fleeting yet meaningful connections with people coming by the merch table. I met aspiring artists who were just getting back to their craft, had a beautiful conversation with someone who recently lost their cat, and heard so many people say “thank you for being here.” The gratitude I felt, and feel, at having been able to be part of all of your nights is immense.
So, without further ado, let’s get into Tales from the Merch Table: Spring 2024.
Want to keep up with Urban Heat? Check them out on TikTok , or find them on Instagram! And maybe check out their fundraiser to help them get to Europe later this year!
That’s all for this week! Until next time, stay cozy, and if you want to join your companions around the cauldron, signup for email updates below!
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