Perpignan

AND there it is, the entire region surrounding Perpignan, explored in two days time. This area has always intrigued me. I am obsessed with the ocean and any kind of mountains. Day off a few of us took ourselves to the beach. I love how Floridian style much beach culture is, no matter where. Crowds, stuff for sale, rows of cheap restaurants and shops that look like they disappear come slow season.  But there’s a laid back-ness in the air, and fruit stands everywhere. The water is so blue here, and feels AMAZING. Close your eyes and let it carry you far down the beach. Back at the towels  pass the perfect local cherries around, reading sandy books. Now THATS a day off, PLEASE! 

Show day is a long one because we go on at 12:30. Will and I play hooky from being backstage too much and drive into the Pyrenees. They are craggy, dramatic and awesome! Then they smooth out and get all mossy. Then foreboding, then station de ski dotted. We drive all the way to Andorra, because it’s another country and that seems like a great idea. There’s a lot of strange village names around here, like Llo, and Eus. Like they lost a game of scrabble. Llo has sulfur springs and Eus is truly, as the map says, one of the prettiest villages ever. Tiny tiny stone mazes winding up a sharp hill to the precipice of a gorgeous old crumbly church, it’s bells wavering off the rocks. 

We’ve beat the system today by arriving at the festival past 9pm. Sadly to miss TV On the Radio, happily to have hiked, swum, passed through the mountains and this Catalan land in France. 

We work up some red bull energy to go on late in the night. The show is going fine, a little less intense than we perhaps need to put us in the zone. And then the rain hits harder and harder, reminiscent of our show in Paris last summer where we had to get off stage, the amount of water threatened to cause major harm. A beautiful thing started to happen. While some of the crowd filtered away, the majority that stayed started really rallying for us. And we bit into the rain with force, it feels crazy good when this happens. We know it’s sketchy, with all that power and water. But we played our asses off in the storm and people lost it. It kind of saved the day.  

In our bathing suits and underwear on the backstage balcony minutes later, letting the rain provide our showers, we sang wake up with the crowd below.  We were all having a moment.