Winter Tour Recap: Clara Rose & RapHaella Hero
This has been a season for the books! I am holed up in bed nursing a sinus infection after six weeks of intensive travel, work and performances, meeting magical new and old friends along the road, greeting both some familiar and some strange new challenges offered up to me by this beautiful life. Dazed, grateful, and just a bit chastened by my immune system’s irrefutable reaction to it all. The data is in, and suggests that more than two or three consecutive, energy intensive and/or professionally pressured activities without any rest time in between is, shall we say, ill-advised. I attempted … five such commitments in a row this time. Oh dear!
Clara and I had a wonderful and transformative time on our winter tour, which took us through beautiful (and snowy!) New England this January-February. We played in homes, around fireplaces, for new friends, old friends, strangers (soon to be friends!), teachers, and, I suspect, more than one angel in disguise. We drove through wind and rain and snow (one harrowing trip over a mountain pass gave me my first true snow driving experience – on my birthday no less). Performing live is where our heart is, and we left this tour with our hearts as full as ever with the love of the music we make and the beautiful connections established with our community across the Northeast. After the tour we went into the studio to make our first recordings as a duo, and which came out beautifully – we can’t wait to share them with you!
Spending such a lengthy and intense period of work and life on the east coast proved a challenge for me. Boston is a place I called home very recently – I moved back to California after graduating from Berklee in May of 2024 – and it was surprisingly difficult for me to be there again, this time not having the comforts and familiarities of a ‘home’ of my own to lean on. I love being the host, getting things ‘right’ in social situations, being in control, and providing a willing shoulder for loved ones to cry on. During this trip, I often found myself in the opposite position. I was the one being hosted, fed, and entertained, sometimes stepping on toes, trying to stick to my ‘best behavior,’ crying on friend’s shoulders (either figuratively or literally!), and finding myself exhausted by having no place to actually land. And don’t get me wrong, I love being in the flow of travel and movement, but in some ways this was different from my other experiences of that flow. This time I was trying to work, to push, to have some hold on my day to day beyond simply going with the flow of whatever life brought. I learned a tremendous amount from this period and from the process Clara and I went through to prepare for, perform, and recover from our tour and connected projects as well. I know I will be sorting through and making sense of some of these lessons for some time to come.
Back on the west coast, I am looking to the future with high hopes and formulating not only the lessons learned but some of the dreams revealed by our time together too. I know we are both excited for what comes next, and hope you’ll follow along as we bring our new recordings into the world and plan our next adventures!
