New book Taste in Music: Eating on Tour with Indie Musicians celebrates the crossover between two creative joys
Luke Pyenson (Credit Felix Walworth) and Alex Bleeker (Credit Leanne Kriz)
Out this week from Chronicle Books, Taste in Music: Eating on Tour with Indie Musicians is a new collection of essays curated by Real Estate’s Alex Bleeker and journalist Luke Pyenson (formerly of Frankie Cosmos) which explores “the unique relationship between touring and food and the bonds formed by shared meals and culinary adventures.”
Featuring essays from members of Talking Heads, Portugal. The Man, Pup, Animal Collective, and more, along with promoters, chefs, and food writers such as Roadfood‘s Michael Stern, Taste in Music might be from the perspective of those in the music industry, but the revelatory experience of a good meal turning everything around is something to which any reader can relate.
Be it Cheetie Kumar’s tale of how cooking on the road for her bandmates turned into a career as a restaurateur and chef or Fleet Foxes’ Robin Pecknold recollecting the days when vegan cuisine was, at best, something from Subway, Bleeker, and Pyenson have collected an amazingly diverse array of perspectives. Not only are the musicians varied, but so are the cuisines and locales featured.
You’re just as often to find yourself in someone’s home as at a restaurant, and the communal aspect of sitting around a table and just taking a moment to relax is a frequent focal point.
We hopped on Zoom with Alex Bleeker and Luke Pyenson just ahead of Taste in Music‘s release to discuss the project’s genesis and their own experiences eating while on the road.
The Pitch: I find it very appropriate, Alex, that you are on tour.
Alex Bleeker: I am always on tour. I found it’s become easier to live my life in the tour mindset. I was home for a week last week and it’s like, “I can’t, I’m on tour. I’m just home, but I’m on tour.” It’s pretty wild to have the book and the music tour intersect with each other. I played a show with Real Estate last night and right after this call, I’ll head south and Luke and I have the launch party for the book in Brooklyn tonight. It’s all kind of blending together.
Reading the intro you both wrote, this book has been a long time in the making. It feels well crafted. Did you want to take your time putting this all together?
Luke Pyenson: Yeah, absolutely. I think it’s a subject matter that deserves a lot of care. We just wanted to make sure we did it justice. It was an almost four-year process from start to finish. Honestly, we could have kept going. There’s kind of an infinite amount of work you can do on something as broad as this.
But yeah, we really wanted to make sure we did it right. We wanted to take our time, considering which artists we approached and what types of essays and stories we were soliciting. We wanted to make sure we edited them with care and attention and that they were everything we were envisioning. We didn’t want to cut any corners.
In Taste in Music, the care comes through in that you get the real concept of the idea of these stories frequently being about taking time to appreciate the space in which a musician is in. So many artists I’ve talked to over the years, the thing that frequently comes up when I ask, “What do you do when you’re coming to Kansas City or Lawrence?” is they’re just like, “We wish we had time.”
Alex Bleeker: Right. Well, and often–this was my thesis early on in the book–because there’s so little time and you’re not really visiting a city, it’s kind of like an extended work trip that changes locations every day. For me, I think what I realized through putting together this book is the best way for me to ground myself geographically, culturally in any one place is to eat something that is uniquely of that place, whatever that may mean, without sort of considering it intellectually forever. As I’ve been on tour, I’ve just had this obsession of, like, “I have to I have to eat the best thing possible.”
I’m already thinking about it this morning. There’s a diner in the parking lot of this hotel that I’m staying in and I’m like, “I think I’m going to do that, but that’s not the healthiest option,” but I don’t live on the East Coast anymore, and I love the diner. This is how my brain works. Kansas City specifically, weirdly, comes up for me when I’m just talking about this book, like, “What’s the best barbecue in Kansas City?” The book is not just Kevin Morby’s guide to the best barbecue in Kansas City, you know notable Kansas City but it’s a long-winded way of saying that that’s right.
We don’t have a ton of time in each place. If we have an entire night off in one city, that’s like an eternity in terms of like being a touring musician and it’s rare so, for me and for a lot of people in the book, but also not everybody’s perspective, that’s how to ground yourself. That’s one thing I can do in Kansas City, for example–find some really good barbecue. That’s how I know I’m there, you know?
The book is international, both in terms of where these essays take place, but also in terms of cuisine presented. Was it important to you to make sure that international musicians and international food and international locales were always represented?
Luke Pyenson: Definitely. I think it was a huge focus for us to make sure that we spotlight the diversity of this community that spans every continent, you know, and I think it’s another thing that goes along with the kind of tier of musician, let’s say, that we focus on in this collection. Smaller or midsize indie bands are a little bit more agile and we can travel to more corners of the world than your arena rock folks.
Having a smaller crew, for example, being in one bus instead of a fleet of seven buses or in a van or in a car, you’re able to visit–I don’t want to say more interesting destinations, but maybe a wider variety of destinations and in a wider array of countries. That’s something that I think is one of the most interesting aspects of this corner of indie rock so we really wanted to make sure that we got stories from all over the world.
You bring up also this other thing and it is quite important to us to have highlighted voices from international musicians and international promoters as well to, again, really give a sense of the international scope. The stories from those perspectives in music are not, are not always heard so often and so I think it was important for us to to give a platform to those folks.
In addition to all of the musicians, you have these sections where you talk with promoters. I like the idea of viewing it from the other side where these are the people who see the stream of people coming in, as opposed to being the ones who are constantly on the road, and it provides an interesting bit of contrast. What made you decide to talk to those folks. Is it just because of what they provide culinarily?
Luke Pyenson: We’ve been the beneficiaries of outstanding hospitality from these folks for such a long time. At least in my head, from the very beginning of this project, I knew I wanted to have some stories from promoters because those are the people that you truly don’t hear from. Those are similarly the people that, when we come back and we’re talking to our friends and family about tour, I feel like those are the stories that always that we gravitate towards. It’s sort of a unique window.
Alex Bleeker: All of the promoters in this book are sort of known and beloved within a greater community of these touring musicians too, which is something that’s a neat peek behind the curtain for a fan, right? There’s a woman in Dijon named Chantal I think we write about it in the book. She puts bands up in her home and feeds you breakfast and she has a wall in the entrance way of her home with photos of all the bands that have stayed there. It’s very common to just look on the wall and find your friends.
For years, I would get iPhone photos of myself in that hallway from the various array of other musicians who are also there. That’s the kind of fun stuff that the book provides that you might not necessarily be aware of it, even if you’re a fan of most of the musicians in the book.
Your mentioning iPhone photos makes an interesting point: There are illustrations in photos throughout this book, and I think that’s the wonderful thing about living when we do. The joke is that people always take pictures of their food, but it’s very important for this because you get a real sense of the comradery through these cell phone pics.
Luke Pyenson: Some of these are just from my phone. I mean, a lot of those are from my archive that I never would have really thought would turn up in a printed book. I was so grateful going back through my photos that I took photos of some of these things because I had a photo of almost everything that came up and even other people’s stories. There’s a story about Surinamese food in Amsterdam. The author didn’t have a photo of it. I’ve got 20 photos of Surinamese food and every time I eat it, I take a photo. It really made me feel like it wasn’t a waste to do that.
Alex Bleeker: Yeah, I think early on we recognized that iPhone photos–even old iPhone photos that aren’t very hi-res–were not off the table to help illustrate this book because it’s got an all scale of media. There’s beautiful professional photography in the book too, but it gives it a multimedia tour diary sort of scrapbook kind of feeling.
Luke Pyenson: They look pretty good. Pretty good.
Alex Bleeker: Yeah. No shade on an iPhone photo.
One of my favorite parts of the book comes early on when Michael Stern and Mark Ibold of Pavement have this conversation. Roadfood is such a seminal work in food writing and I’m just curious as to how you made this conversation come together, because it feels like a magazine feature and I mean that in the most complimentary way.
Alex Bleeker: What’s amazing is that everybody has an email address and it’s usually like, Steven Spielberg at gmail dot com probably would work. I’m a huge, huge Pavement fan. [Mark] also toured in Sonic Youth. You can’t get much more like legendary indie rock than that. We just had a sort of indirect connection to him and we sent him an email.
We knew he was into food. He was super down to talk. We talked to him first and then he brought up Roadfood and Eat Your Way Across the USA and how important they were to Pavement when they were touring, ’cause this was obviously pre-iPhone. I think it was Luke’s idea on the call. Like, “What if we just tried to find Michael and connected the two of you and you had a conversation?” Right?
Luke Pyenson: I just felt like, “Yeah, I bet we could, I bet we could track him down.”
Alex Bleeker: I think we literally googled him and found an email address and asked if he wanted to do it and he said, “Yeah.”
Luke Pyenson: It was on the contact form on the Roadfood website and his assistant got back to me And actually yeah, it was it was not so tricky. There were some people in this book that were a little trickier to get a hold of and some people that we wanted to get a hold of that we couldn’t but this was one of the first things we did, actually. We did this even before we had a literary agent.
This was when we were working on our proposal and the fact that they were both willing to do it on spec, so to speak, before we had a book deal, very, very early on in the process and that they responded to us and that it came out so wonderfully–I mean, I was just like, “Wow, I guess we can really make a book.”
Alex Bleeker: It was an early win. We like, “Oh yeah, we have a book. We have a book now. This is going to work.”
Along those lines, in your individual introductions for each of these essays you, there are a lot of personal connections between both of you and many of the folks in here. Who were some of the more cold call or cold email folks that you were just like, “I want to know what they think?”
Luke Pyenson: Chris Frantz is a good example. I mean, he was kind of a bucket list contributor that I was not expecting to be able to get in touch with, but I read his memoir in 2020 when it came out and really wanted to do my very best to get him involved in this. That was a complete cold email and I was honestly stunned that he got back to us, but he was a pleasure to work with. I’m really glad he did. I’m trying to think of some others.
Alex Bleeker: Dawn Richard. A mutual friend, was like, “You really should talk to Dawn. She’s got an amazing story. She cooks all of her own vegan meals for herself on tour,” and that was an artist I wasn’t familiar with before we made the book, and now listen to her music all the time. It’s super awesome. That was just like, “Hey, would you want to talk?” and she was like, “Yeah.” That was another early one that was super cold.
Luke Pyenson: Cheetie Kumar, the chef and musician in North Carolina, someone that I’ve been hearing about for a while. We’ve both played at her club, Kings in Raleigh, and I got to eat at the restaurant Garland, which was below it, up until recently. That was a completely cold email, but she really is one of the true food and music people. She really has done both, you know? I felt strongly that her perspective would add a lot. I didn’t even know the extent of the cross-pollination, let’s say, between food and music and her story. We really had a great time chatting with her.
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Now that Taste in Music is out, how does it feel to hold it in your hands and see it fully assembled?
Alex Bleeker: I would say that it’s completely surreal that it is an actual physical object. This was a sort of loose conception in both of our minds before we even started working on it. We’d had conversations about making a book like this for a couple of years before we actually even thought it was possible to begin on the journey to make a book. The only thing that I have to compare it to is like the completion of a record, which is all always surreal and special in its own way, too, but for Luke and I, it’s a little bit different.
Even though I wanted to make this book, and I always knew that the book was a good idea, Luke has a more writerly history than I do. For me–and I’ll let Luke speak too, ’cause I know it’s different, but it was never even on my bingo card: “published author with a hardcover book.” I still can’t believe it. It’s kind of unreal.
Luke Pyenson: I don’t want to say it was on my bingo card necessarily, ’cause I am a writer. It’s been a dream of mine. I mean, this specific concept or some version of this concept has been a dream of mine for a very, very long time. I mean, over a decade, at least.
I remember having conversations in college about wanting to do some kind of book that combined these things so, yeah, holding it in my hands is just incredible. To me, it’s more like holding a college degree in my hands than a vinyl because it’s been a four-year process. It has taken a lot of time to go through college, and it feels like that kind of accomplishment to me, honestly. It’s the project I’ve worked on for the longest in my life because records don’t take four years. I mean, for my band, we’d never spent that much time on a record.
Alex Bleeker: This is our Chinese Democracy.
Alex Bleeker and Luke Pyenson’s Taste in Music: Eating on Tour with Indie Musicians is out now from Chronicle Books.
