I've been a little dormant in my diary activities of late, much like a hibernating animal, I haven't yet been able to shake off the lethargy of the winter cold but I'm determined to make a good start this year. Comparing myself to a small furry mammal may not be the greatest of beginnings but from small things come bigger and better things, at first what seems like a squirrel can one day become a large roaring grizzly bear.. The metaphorical hole I've been digging for myself is becoming a chasm, I should step around it while there's still time.

All of this to say, Happy new year! Happy new year then to all of you strange and obviously slightly but wonderfully maladjusted sensitive souls that may chance upon this diary and actually read it. Thank you for getting here, I hope you find some nourishment here of sorts, some small nuts to hideaway for lean times. Squirrel jokes aside, words and music are like food and we need to eat to be healthy. Whether singing, writing or listening, we're all after the same thing.

Words are messengers, they bear things that need to be transmitted and our songs, letters or emails shuttle those small parcels of emotion to each other. I get a lot of emails on my website or messages on myspace from people all over the world, often from countries I've never been to or places I've sometimes never heard of and it's very moving to open these small parcels of love, to know that someone somewhere thought it was important enough to share their thoughts or feelings about the music because something took place that made that song or line have meaning for them. It's what I, like any music lover anywhere, have done over the years, been moved by songs and felt as if in someway I was one with it, that I understood it, not in any way I could ever explain, but as if I held momentarily the key to its heart. Songs like for example Skip James's Cypress grove, Dick Gaughan's version of The snows they melt the soonest or Arvo Part's arrangement of a poem by Robert Burns called My heart is in the highlands. ( Please go and give these pearls a listen, I have them and others on a player at the moment in my playlist on piersfaccini.com)

It's humbling to know that in some tiny way, somewhere someone is feeling something comparable when listening to something I've penned. Often I have to read the messages twice to realise they're talking about one of my songs, I spent so many years thinking that no one could possibly relate to what I was writing. All of this really then to say ' thank you!' Thank you to all of you who somewhere somehow feel and then put your feelings in small electronic parcels for me to open. It feeds me and keeps me well nourished!

One of the wonderful things about touring are the spontaneous friendships that spring up from this strange way of life. Often I'll find myself chatting over a drink after the gig with whoever wasn't in a rush to get out and felt like sharing their impressions with me. I've met so many great people that way, some I'll never see again and others who no doubt I will. One such new friend Bill sent me this email, he'd read my blog about the gig where I'd been heckled for singing sad songs, this was his response. Cheers Bill and thanks for sharing your words!

Here's what he wrote, "I yearn for those songs that break me, shatter me, rip me apart, and then build me back up again, all in the span of four minutes. Those songs that bring tears instantly upon hearing that first note. Those songs that render me completely defenceless against their beauty, but extraordinarily empowered after they are over. I've played Each Wave That Breaks probably more than even YOU have, yet I could not tell you what the song is about. I simply haven't gotten that far yet. It's too much to handle for me; I am no match for something that beautiful. But I am obsessed with letting it operate on me. Because I like how these experiences make me feel. They literally morph me into a better person, one lyric/scene/page/act at a time. And how could I pretend that anything else I might do in life is more constructive?"

I'll look forward then to the next load of chance encounters that this life conjures up, on the road, after a gig or in the virtual ether world. Happy travels in 2008!

After we come off stage, I head to the merch stand to see if anyone wants to have a chat or have my scrawling signature on their freshly purchased albums. I sometimes have trouble spelling their names, a combination of having just played and being still unfamiliar with the various accents here, often I hear one thing when it's really another so I've learnt to ask for the spelling.

One day I had to ask a guy to say his name five times before I figured it out, 'What's your name?'
'Braaee'
'What was that?'
'Braaeeeeeeii'
'One more time?'
'Braeeeeeeeeeiiii'
'Spell it for me?'
'Brad'
'Oh Brad, ok'
Oops..

Ben's crew has been really good to hang out with. These guys are like a cross between zen monks and hardened soldiers, the pace of their days would have most people screaming of exhaustion after 48 hours, and they work and live like this 7-10 months of the year. The only people I can think of who'd deal comfortably with this level of continuous exhaustion would be mothers of young children.
As I've mentioned before humour's the key to survival, it's the one constant never to be forgotten, and on the road, the ones who make you laugh are the best companions.

I was chatting with one of the crew, sharing some laughs over a glass of wine late one night as we waited for the bus to drive off into the night, I asked him what he did when he wasn't working and he said that his main objective away from the road consisted of doing as little as possible in as monotonous and repetitive a way as he could make it. 'When you're on tour' he said, 'nothing is ever the same, each day the place is always different, the people in the places are always different, the food, the showers, the streets, the venue, the weather..nothing is ever the same and that can make you go a little loopy after a while so when I go home I make up for it by underlining the sameness of it all, by doing very little except, sleeping in the same bed, being in the same house, in the same street, having the same shower, seeing the same people, eating the same food etc."
I like his logic, it works for him, he's probably the least tired looking person on the bus!

I've noticed the musicians always look far more tired than the crew, I guess we're a bit soft, we must be missing our hours of beauty sleep.

We've had a good run so far, we've played in some incredible places and met some great people and hopefully shared something with this music that'll make them come and see us next time we roll through.
The first thing travelling teaches you is that although some of the people that you meet correspond eerily to a given national type or manifest traits that you could learn about in a travel guide, most don't. Proof that first and foremost we're individuals (with the exception of airport staff) who just happen to be English, American, French, Senegalese or Chinese..
As one wise drunk once told me propping up a bar:
'Arseholes come in all shapes and sizes..'

Luckily, flipping that particular truism around, the same can be said of the kind of people you're only ever too happy to encounter and chew the cud with and I've met many of those on this run.

Although this tour has been the Rolls-Royce of tours to open, it still remains an opening gig, playing for only 35 minutes while most people drift into the theatre to see the headliner only to be (hopefully) pleasantly surprised as they sup their beers to hear that the opener not only 'does'nt suck but is pretty good!' I quote. It's almost as if most of the audience come to the theatre with the idea that most probably the opener is going to be rubbish. As we walk out each night, you can almost touch the sense of expectation that there is in the air, namely that as soon as I open my mouth to sing, a hideous wail of a note will come out. One guy came up to me after the gig and told me how he'd watched the whole of our performance waiting for us to fuck something up, he seemed almost disappointed that we hadn't, in his eyes we'd broken some kind of rule, a rule that keeps you forever in the status of opener perhaps.
In New York, as we started Fire in my head, a voice indignantly called out' who are you?' the subtext being, 'you're not really trying to be any good are you?'and if so 'tell us who you are!' I enjoy shooting arrows at that particular bubble but on the whole, it takes a couple of songs to get the audience on side.

On that note, big up to the Montreal crowd for being an incredible audience who not only came on time for the opening of the show but also for giving us a beautiful basking silence to play to. Merci Montreal!

Back in California again, we have three days to practice in the Everloving back room before the tour starts. Three days feels like a luxury, I normally only get only a couple of days max before a tour to prepare the shows and that normally includes teaching the songs to a new musician. This time Jose and Adam know the songs so the practice is more about honing down the detail and working on the dynamics.



We'll be playing in some of the oldest and most beautiful theatres in America including New York's Radio City Music Hall and the Chicago Theatre which was the first Vaudeville theatre built here in the US in 1921. I'll be savouring every detail of this tour, of all the Ben Harper tours to be opening, this one is the most suited to my music.

Three days later we're on the plane to Boulder, Colorado to meet up with Ben Harper and his crew. I have my guitar with me on the plane whenever I can, to avoid it being bashed around and as I sit down, the girl sitting next to me asks if I'm a musician and what kind of music I play. In order to give an easy answer, I say the music is kind of folky. She looks at me a little bemused and says " Oh I've never heard of that." Should be an interesting tour..

America's the only country in the world that you have to bring warm clothes for when you're inside. When its 25C outside its 14C inside and I don't have huge layers of blubber to keep these man made chills out of my bones.They should redesign the whole concept of coat racks and wardrobes here. When you step out of the cafe or restaurant, instead of picking up your coat you should be handing it to a concierge to keep for when you next come back. Maybe they could have a one size fits all coat you could put on in whatever glacial air conditioned public space you happen to be in. I think i'm onto something here, maybe we could bring back the blue Mao coat and inadvertently get all Americans wearing the blue uniforms of Communist China whenever they drink their skinny lattes...may never happen. I digress.

We're sleeping on the tour bus with the crew and there's a secret battle going on with me and one of the crew, I regularly sneak to the air conditioning control panel and turn up the thermostat only to pass by minutes later to see that the ice addicts have tipped it back down to arctic levels. I won't let them defeat me and each day I dream up ways of sabotaging the air con unit. Back home when its 14C, we call that Winter and we wear coats and scarves and hats, here they wear shorts and t shirts.



We're in Indianapolis tonight, it's the 5th gig of the tour, Adam and Jose have been playing well and the band is starting to gel nicely. I start the shows by myself and end with Talk to her on the acoustic. In the 35 minutes that we have I try to give as full a range of the songs as I can, by the end of the set, there's a sweet silence settled over the crowd. Afterwards, there's a rush to the merch stand to buy the album so we must be doing something right.



Last night I joined Ben to sing Masters of War, it felt like the best version we'd ever sung, Oliver and Jay of the ICs seemed to think so too. Meanwhile Ben's playing a bunch of songs that I've never heard him play live before but these sets are amongst the best gigs I've heard him play since I first began touring with him with fantastic renditions of Like a King, Rise and Oppression. Meanwhile I still get goose pimples when they play Where could I go. Hats off Ben!

Next up Detroit...

My journey opening for Ben Harper has now taken me in the space of a year or so from the Olympia in Paris, the Hammersmith Apollo in London and the Enmore in Sydney all the way to Radio City Music Hall in New York via the Ryman in Nashville. Radio City is the grand wedding cake of all the theatres on this tour with an unrivalled history to boot.



New Yorkers are famously hard to please and the people were still filtering through the doors as we took to the stage but midway through the set, it felt like the crowd's energy was beginning to settle into the music. I use the energy of the band and the more dynamic songs to work up to the last piece which I play by myself. Playing solo and having the audiences' full attention at this kind of venue is like breathing in pure oxygen whilst diving into the ocean, you go deep down, deep down and then up.

The most frequent question I get asked after the gigs here in America is' how do you say your name?' or ' where are you from?' My preferred answer would be, ' I don't know' but that would only lead to more questions. 'Where do you come from' is like the question 'who are you' to which the only real and appropriate answer should be silence. 'We come from silence and we will return to silence and everything in the middle is just silence pretending to be something else called noise' but that kind of obtuseness would get me into trouble too. 'oh you mean where was I born?' or ' do you mean what's my nationality?'



I have a British passport and was born in a town called Luton in what is now part of the bulging suburbs of London and which was, if i'm not mistaken, voted the 2nd worst town in Britain although I'm not sure which was the worst. My eldest brother was born in Cambridge, land of erudition and genius, historical birthplace of countless great minds and theories, of scientific breakthroughs and philosiphical wisdom. ' Me' I say, ' I was born in Luton, yes, that's right, near the airport.

Soon we won't have passports, we'll have little chips in our fingers which will contain every footprint of our lives, from our birthplace and nationality to our race and religion, sex, sexuality, bank statements and spending histories. I can't wait for that moment as I won't have to answer anymore questions, maintaining the monk like silence referred to above, I'll push my digit onto the nearest screening device to which, after a quick perusal from my interogator, I'll get a, ' Oh Luton, Luton as in airport?'

So I say I'm from London as I have come to the conclusion that I am not my birthplace but rather the place where I have spent the most amount of waking hours and it seems like most people here know where London is although one guy in Nashville did say, 'cool, that's in France right?'

Last night I joined Ben Harper and the Innocent Criminals on stage in Washington DC a few blocks down from the White House and from where there was a big anti war protest the day before we arrived and where as I write some minds are apparently considering going to war with Iran. As loud as we sang they won't have heard any strains of our rendition of Masters of War but it felt appropriate to be singing it all the same.



Music is the opposite of war, its reconciliation. Politicians the world over should get to more gigs, it might freshen up their dusty minds... although I'm not sure the Bushes, Blairs and Sarkozys of this world would get onto my guest list.

Speaking of Iran, here's a poem by one of the greatest Persian poets of all time, Hafiz, this poem was written in the C14th and while I'm on the subject, its worth noting that by a strange twist of fate, America's most widely read poet today is none other than Rumi, another Persian.

Listen
Listen more carefully to what is around you
Right now

In my world
There are the bells from the clanks
Of the morning milk drums,

And a wagon wheel outside my window
Just hit a bump

Which turned into an ecstatic chorus
Of the Beloved's Name.

There is the Prayer Call
Rising up like the sun
out of the mouths of a thousand birds.

There is an astonishing vastness
Of movement and life

Emanating sound and light
From my folded hands

And my even quieter simple being and heart.

My dear
Is it true that your mind
Is sometimes like a battering
Ram

Running all through the city,
Shouting so madly inside and out

About the ten thousand things
That do not matter?

Hafiz, too
For many years beat his head in youth

And thought himself at a great distance,
far from the armistice
With God.

But that is why this scarred old pilgrim
Has now become such a sweet rare vintage
Who weeps and sings for you.

That is why Hafiz will forever in his verse
Play his cymbal and call to you.

O listen
Listen more carefully
To what is inside of you right now.

In my world
All that remains is the wondrous call to
Dance and prayer

Rising up like a thousand suns
Out of the mouth of a single bird.