The Food Person: A Guest Post by Luke Pyenson
Go on the road and experience food from America to Japan and more with musicians Alex Bleeker of Real Estate and Luke Pyenson formerly of Frankie Cosmos. Read on for Luke’s exclusive essay on how this collaboration came to be and discover a few of his favorite faraway foodie destinations.
Hardcover $27.95
Taste in Music: Eating on Tour with Indie Musicians
Taste in Music: Eating on Tour with Indie Musicians
By Luke Pyenson , Alex Bleeker
In Stock Online
Hardcover $27.95
Go on tour with a few of your favorite indie artists and eat across the world — right from the comfort of your own home.
Go on tour with a few of your favorite indie artists and eat across the world — right from the comfort of your own home.
Each band has that one member—the food person. The member who fills hours in the van not by journaling, looking out the window, or even listening to music, but by obsessively researching places to eat. It took about 30 seconds for my co-author Alex Bleeker and I to recognize we were each that member in our respective bands (Real Estate and Frankie Cosmos) when we went first on tour together in 2017.
Fast forward to early 2021—still in Covid lockdown, and both feeling a little lost without the ability to go on tour. We’d discussed the idea of a book before—something like a touring musicians’ guide to eating around the world, since musicians go everywhere and eat everything. It turns out that during the pandemic’s first year, we’d each been mulling over different versions of that idea.
Alex texted me in, I think, February 2021: “Want to make that book?” I said “yes” immediately. But what “that book” turned out to be came about completely organically—yes, through our own plotting and planning, but also through conversations with our peers in music that began to shape our days, weeks, and months as work got underway.
Alex’s guidebook idea fused with my own food journalism background as we started collecting essays from fellow musicians based around the theme of “eating on tour.” To us, the format of an anthology was a no-brainer; we wanted as many diverse perspectives as possible.
The essays, like the conversations that sparked them, were all “about food,” but nothing about food is ever only about food. It’s simply the lens through which we hone in on all sorts of deeper truths about the human experience. In this case, food is the window in to a whole universe of touring that Alex, our friends, and I know well, but that we felt popular culture hadn’t updated since the days of Almost Famous.
Without even having to nudge our contributors—who represent many scenes and eras of indie music—we found that everybody was ready to be vulnerable, open, and personal, and that the prompt of “What do you eat on tour?” opened the door to so many stories that folks couldn’t wait to tell. We organized them into three broad categories—hospitality, wellness/self-care, and family/identity—though there are threads connecting them all.
Stories take place around the world, sometimes showcasing Bourdainian culinary wanderlust, other times featuring food as a source of conflict or anxiety. During the pandemic’s live music shutdown, Alex and I saw that touring musicians were portrayed in the media a little more multidimensionally than usual—that is to say, not just partying and chucking televisions out of hotel windows. We noticed an appetite to really understand the lifestyle, and this book is a manifestation of that. To understand what going on tour is really like, you start with food.
These days, the two of us have different relationships to touring (although we just completed our first book tour!). Alex still tours heavily with his band Real Estate, while I amicably left my group Frankie Cosmos while working on the book. Most of my road-tripping now is between New York, where I live, and my hometown of Boston. Most often I stop at BT’s Smokehouse in Sturbridge, MA for barbecue, but I’ve also been known to stop in New Haven for pizza (my favorite is Modern Apizza), and Fall River, MA for Portuguese food at the wonderful Portugalia Marketplace.
There’s one spot from my touring days that I truly miss: Saxapahaw General Store in Saxapahaw, NC, which I first visited on a genuine non-tour road trip with college friends. It’s a gourmet market and café attached to a gas station. The biscuits and gravy are the best I’ve ever had.