live music

They Are Gutting A Body Of Water @ 40.7099920, -73.9262855 /  by William Green

Yesterday At 3:10PM.

Doug texts me a GPS pin. I grab my camera bag and run out the door. When I get there, there are about twenty people playing volleyball and absolutely no sign of a show. I text Doug to make sure I’m in the right place. He tells me they’re around the block scouting another spot.

A few minutes later another set of cords come through, a couple streets over and on the other side of the tracks. I find a hole in the fence, cut across that way, push through some bushes and suddenly pop out in front of a bunch of familiar faces.

Things are already starting to assemble themselves. Cables are being run to generators. Fif is doing sound out of the trunk of a car. People are carrying things back and forth trying to turn a dead-end street into a venue before anybody really has time to think about it.

At some point we realize Emily left her pedals and bass strap somewhere. I realized the strap had almost perfect little notches at each end. Good enough, My camera bag became a strap.

I asked Doug if he cared if I climbed onto the roof of the van once everything started to kick off so I could shoot a composite from up there.

He said he didn’t care, just don’t let anybody else up. Fair enough.

Eventually I abandoned the van. Next door there was a lot full of old garbage trucks, so I wandered over there and climbed on top of one of those instead. It was a great view from up there, A few hundred people packed into the end of a street, train tracks behind them, generators humming, everyone gathered around.

Maybe forty minutes later the music stopped.

Walking back from the parking lot next door, I found a kid’s school ID on the ground. I carried it back into the crowd, holding it up next to random faces until eventually I found him and handed it back to him. As people started disappearing, Olivia came over and gave me a hug. We talked for a little bit and I made her photo before everyone scattered.

Before leaving, I grabbed everyone to walk over to the tracks for a few group photos.

A show had appeared out of almost nothing and disappeared about as quickly. I hugged everyone and went on my way.

Racing Mount Pleasant : Summer '26 Tour Vlog /  by William Green

A few weeks have passed now, and I'm still finding little reminders of this trip. Setlist stuffed into my jacket pocket. A receipt stuffed into a camera bag. The notes I kept typing into my phone while waiting in airports. Three cities have already started collapsing into one memory, somewhere between delayed flights, gas station dinners, hotel rooms held together by blow-up mattresses, and furniture neatly stacked in the corner.

I landed in Denver for the first show after a broken pilot's chair delayed the flight, wandered through an empty venue while barbecue smoked outside a gutted Airstream green room, then spent the next few days following Racing Mount Pleasant through Des Moines and Minneapolis. Somewhere in between there were soccer balls kicked around parking lots while waiting for load in, Casey's dad telling me he'd read my interview with the band back in January, a kid named Nolan who drove several states with his mom just to say hello before the show, and an entire room rearranged every night so nine people could somehow convince a two-bed hotel room to become home.

The shows themselves almost feel secondary looking back. Smacking my head on a stage beam I'd been explicitly warned about with a piece of neon green gaff tape, Byron laughing through the encore because he suddenly had a guitar in his hands instead of merch. Stopping load out long enough to bury a dead bird in the alley. Sitting alone in another Delta terminal with my legs resting on a Pelican case while my flight home slipped from 10 p.m. to 3 a.m. By the time I finally made it back to New York at five in the morning, the last thing waiting for me was three taxi drivers screaming at each other in the LaGuardia pickup garage. Somehow it felt like the only appropriate ending.