Morgan Wallace continues her contemplative tour diary, on and off the road as saxophonist in Fat Dog.
The Off Season and the America I never finished
The Off Season
There’s been no tour diary for a while because there’s been no tour for a while. Fat Dog last played abroad in November, I went around the UK in December.
I work teaching in a music shop now. I go in on the same days of the week each week, a consistency I didn’t think I was capable of. I kept January busy to avoid the usual January feeling. I’ve been playing music with different people. It’s been good. It’s been different. Sometimes it feels like there’s an itch that isn’t scratched.
Cycling home from Brixton tonight, my legs hit the pedals as fast as they can. It needs to be more, the muscle slamming up against itself, hard enough that you shut your eyes with the speed of it. It needs to be faster, something needs to come out somewhere. I want to make a wall of sound or cycle faster than my body will carry me. One or the other. The hill doesn’t go on long enough.
This is the longest time I’ve been in the UK without leaving since 2022. It’s not all about the location, but the version of myself that comes with it. I’m cycling home from The Windmill, I was playing sax for someone else. Three and a half years of running to end up back at the start except I am older now with young people watching me. The version of me from 2022 who hasn’t left yet watches the gig from the crowd. She thinks she will be gone before she hits that age.
A few weeks ago I sat in a friend’s kitchen and she said ‘what if festival season never comes back’. At least it’s the off season for everyone. It’s funny that something supposedly seasonal lasted for three years of my life.
And of course there is the America that I never finished, hanging in the interim like I am myself. A blip between calendars, I wade through this downtime not entirely sure if I’m going forwards or backwards. The America that I never finished; notes written down from the East Coast leg of tour at the end of September. 4.5 months ago now.
Something needs to be actualised. I would like to get to the top of Brixton Hill. I would like to type up the last of America.
The East Coast (after my time alone in New York) 19.09.25 – 30.09.25
I’m flying out from JFK to meet the others. Charlie Kirk was shot one week ago. Speaking to my sister on the phone it comes up in conversation. I think of driving down the highway and seeing a memorial billboard 50 feet wide. It’s fresh here, and polarised. Any British dry humour overhead by strangers may not go down too well. We talk about other things.
I land in Atlanta, drop my bags, and reunite with the others in a pub. It feels surreal and anticlimactic. All the familiar faces around a table in a pub anywhere in a world, always the same, always as if it never ended. A full oompah band walks in in lederhosen. Not exactly what I was picturing for Atlanta. ‘Do you think they’re just here to grab a beer with their mates?’. We follow them into the beer garden, and they are not. It’s an early Octoberfest. There is a projector behind them where someone is creating a powerpoint in real time. I watch them choose the animated transitions just behind the tuba player’s head.
The others are trawling through Facebook marketplace, modern day treasure hunting for the most obscure things you can find in every city. Michael finds a bass that he wants and phones the guy selling it. The stranger on the phone tells Michael he is signed to Domino records and he is already coming to our show tonight. He’s from the band Upchuck. I didn’t even know they lived here.
Now I am back with people I know, the ‘small world !’ moments have come back. I am no longer myself, alone, looking out on a random landscape. The parameters have moved back in. Things move in relation and coincidentally.
Walking back to the hotel, a random guy is heckling from outside the diner.
“Hey how’s it going?”, he says
“Well, how about you ?”
“Work in progress”, he says.
Later we head to the venue in two cabs and there are police all over the street. Michael texts from the other car asking where we are. Are we in the traffic from the shooting? That’s what the cops must be here for then. The radio in the Uber says the same thing. The driver says ‘Welcome to Georgia’.
Georgia is the shootiest place that I’ve ever been. The police tape is directly outside of our venue so we drive round the back, and get dropped in an alley down the side. Later some people outside the venue call it ‘the rent control’.
An hour after arriving we realise we left the pedals at the hotel so me and Joe go back. The road outside is now completely clear, no evidence of police tape having ever existed. Perfectly wiped down. It feels well practised.
The Festival
Driving into the festival every bag has to be searched. The driver tells us there were problems with people bringing guns into the park. “Second amendment folks”, they couldn’t stop them because the park is public property. In the end they just moved the entrance. Now you have to drive down a small private driveway on your route to entering the park. No guns can pass through the private property. It is strange the absurdist loopholes that are created to preserve an absurder freedom.
We spend a few hours ping-ponging between our air-conned tent, the stage and the catering. As line check time is finally coming around I get stopped by a security guard on my way to stage. “Where are you going to?”
“The stage” I say.
“What band are you with?”, and I pause to wonder if that’s just how the sentence is naturally phrased, or the implications of ‘with’ as opposed to ‘in’.
“Fat Dog” I say.
He tells me that the gig is starting soon and I can’t be going that way for a while, they’re about to be on. I tell him that I am playing in the band. He lets me through with an air of nuisance and awkwardness that somehow feels mine to apologise for. I wonder if anyone else got these questions and I know they didn’t. They wouldn’t have to say that they are playing so explicitly.
A few hours later I tell one of the others about it, but he doesn’t understand the point because I don’t say it explicitly. I don’t want to have to, to be the first to say ‘woman’. Sometimes I think that should be deducible from evidence, rather than me being seen as framing things through a certain lens.
“You don’t really look like you belong on stage” he says as a joke, missing the point.
On stage in Georgia at 1pm it is boiling hot. Too hot. I change out of my black t-shirt into a white tank top, my coolest possible option. Joe gets into the crowd and keeps looking back up at us, struggling. “Has anyone got any water that’s not fucking boiling?” He’s been trying to drink the cartons left on the subs. I throw him a can overhand and he catches it one handed. There’s a little clap from the audience at that and I’m very pleased; not usually my forte.
Joe tips the water all over himself, and in a gap where I can put the sax down, I do the same. I grab the sax back just in time for the next drop. A few minutes later I look down and realise my error. The water has made my tank top completely see through, Target materials are not the highest of quality. I am not wearing a bra which didn’t mean anything before, but is pretty relevant now. For a second I panic wondering what can I do about this, and quickly realise there is absolutely nothing. One of the most stereotypical nightmares; suddenly naked on stage. This stage has big screens on either side where a camera is sending live videos of the band zoomed in and in one thousand pixels. Nothing to be done now.
Afterwards I steal a shirt from merch and don’t check the Instagram.
That night we make a pit stop at Bass Pro before our drive. A sales assistant hears us talking and sidles over, saying “Double O seven, at your service” in a BBC English accent. I show him my valley girl American accent. He finds it hilarious. “Can you do any other American accents?”
“No, I don’t really even know what that one is”. He tells me it sounds like the girl character from Sponge-bob.
We both try and do Australian accents next, and decide that we are great with no Australians present. He advises me on steak rubs. I’m slightly hyperactive from the overstimulation of Bass Pro; an aquarium to my right, a shooting arcade to my left. He’s very animated because he’s an American and also a sales assistant. I love this guy and he loves me, and we are both entertainingly novel to each other.
“Hey, you have the perfect personality to work in the Georgia State Aquarium” he says. I’m genuinely very flattered, and spend the rest of the day smug that I could work in the Georgia State Aquarium.
The day off in Raleigh
We have the day off and we’re looking up things to do on google maps. Look at your current location, zoom out slowly until something interesting pops up. The sculpture park is pretty close to us, just down the road to the right. We start walking there but it feels wrong. Dillon says to check that this is actually the walking route, and google maps says it is. There are no pavements here so it feels like we’re just walking on the side of a highway. No pedestrian traffic lights telling you when to cross. I pretend I am a car and cross when their lights go green. We end up walking over a bridge with another highway underneath. There’s just a small motorway-style-blockade fencing off the drop. I try to walk in a very straight line without getting too close to either side; the cars speeding past or the drop below.
We get into the sculpture park and exhale. We’re talking but I stop when I hear the noise. The swings are singing. Some kind of sound instillation, notes ringing out each time they move back and forth.
We walk towards it, down a little slope of overgrown grass with tufts and florets sticking out at all angles. There are dragon flies out and the sun overhead. It’s almost like walking in slow motion, the vista expanding in front of us, and the sound morphing. The conversation fades away under the song and we just get on. I forgot how much I like swinging. I’m going forward and forward and there’s wind all around me from the speed. The metal sings above me and children play in the grass.
All there is is sound and movement, this is the happiest I’ve been in a long time. Jumping forwards, a little out of breath and smiling. I’m flying in mid air on something I’d totally forgotten about. I want to swing forever, but don’t have to, the movement is a pearl that exists now, locked and circular. Sitting and silent, yet moving and under song, both of us jumping forwards into the sky and the sun.
Moving forward
Raleigh feels like we’ve settled down, we’ve had the three nights in the same hotel, the longest we’ve had in one place for the whole tour. I’ve been doing my laundry. In the gig I feel like a middle-aged American talk show host with a costar. “Let’s break some bread, Morgan” Joe says just before Peace Song drops.
A bit later “We are Fat Dog and you are….”
A pause
“Where are we Morgan ?… Raleigh !” Too much breakfast TV. I quite like it.
The next day we head on to Baltimore. At a gas station on the way Rob loses his green tea. “What the fuck. What the fuck. That was all I wanted”
“In life?”, I say.
“At this present moment, yeah. What is life if not the present moment”
We pass through Philly, New York, and Boston. Michael is trying to sell his bass en route without much luck. He’s trying to offload the old one after buying the new bass in Atlanta. We get to Canada, with both basses, and bump into Diana in Montreal. This gig is a festival, so the coincidence is a bit less shocking. She tells us people from all over the world are at this festival. “People from the United States, Ireland, Leeds”. I laugh at the inclusion of Leeds, an interesting globality.
Later, in Toronto, we go to an all night diner that’s been open for 100 years. Someone told us about it in a bar, but I can’t remember the name. I google “all night diner open 100 years near me” and it works. We are hanging out with a woman who says she’s from Leeds and Manchester. She has a north American accent. The conversation is maybe warped due to my own tiredness. She doesn’t sound like she is from Leeds, a surprisingly relevant place in Canada.
Final Day
The last day of the tour. The van, the tour manager, Michael and Chris have already gone. The leftovers from the month, and the last of us sit flatly in the hotel lobby waiting for the hours to pass.
“We’re quite close to Niagara Falls” I say.
“Maybe we should go there”. Dillon says.
“What if we got an uber ?” He’s not serious but I am. I look it up. If we’re going to go and make it back in time for the flight, we have to leave instantly. We grab Rob, call the cab, and Shervin picks us up.
Shervin is a seasoned Niagara Falls veteran, he has a free pass for the car park and agrees to drive us home afterwards if we pay him in cash. He plays Bob Marley and tells us facts about bridges. There is fire spurting out of a factory out of the window, and we drive over an ocean that he’s trying to persuade us is a lake.
When we arrive we start looking at fridge magnets before I remember we have hardly any time. Force of habit. We run outside and are greeted by the permanent rainbow, still there one year later. I came here in October 2024 during that America tour with a totally different set of people. But the rainbow is the same. I stare at the heaviness of the water, all the weight just rolling over the edge. Tonnes and tonnes of it falling away every second into weightless vapour that floats back up. The mist rises higher than the fall. We get rained on from a completely clear blue sky, left soaked and squinting in the pictures.
Last year the leaves had turned for Autumn a little bit more. In that moment I make a grand plan to get rich enough to visit every year. No idea of how it’s going to happen. Maybe then I won’t just be running through on the way to somewhere else.
We video call everyone, “ANSWER THE PHONE RIGHT NOW” and try to take it in. But soon it’s time to find Shervin and head back. It was a good day.
And back at the hotel in the last hour I go for a walk. It’s in a no-mans land retail area outside of the city. So many places like that here. An unplotted place on a square grid. We’ve reached the end, no land left to explore. Just the wide sky, no one around, the roads, and the squares. I hum a song out loud as I walk along. It’s just me the pavement and the grass after all. At the end of the street there is a phone mast and I stand perfectly in it’s shadow. I’m humming sister golden hair surprise. That song came on in a grocery store in Raleigh as soon as I walked in a week or so ago, but I’d been listening to it already.
I head back to the hotel. In the car to the airport, only me Joe and Ellis left, Joe says he always feels nostalgic about America. Even the time we went in Autumn 2024. Even the West Coast leg at the start of this month. Pioneertown and Snowqualmie.
I like the endlessness of it. A week later I sit on a train travelling through the rolling hills of Southern England, and part of me wants to see something more alien stretching away from myself out the window.