Flat Tires Lost Highway Tour
Posted to the band’s website April 6
Join the Flat Tires on the back half of the Lost Highway Tour! The band will play 15 shows in 12 cities with a final show in Los Angeles on June 3. Limited tickets are still available for select shows, but they’re going fast.Click here to see availability.
At any earlierpoint in his life, River would have said he didn’t have time to miss someone while he was on tour. Tours were filled with interviews and shows and post-show parties and travel and the kind of exhaustion that meant you slept whenever you had a few minutes to yourself. Sound check and wardrobe and networking with other famous people; every minute of his day was scheduled. Usually he had just enough time to miss his own bed.
It shouldn’t have surprised him that he missed the man who was usually next to him in it. It did, though, and Eric and Ward gave him endless shit. “Now you know what it’s like!”
In River’s opinion, they could enjoy it a little less.
The time difference didn’t help. He and Jem kept up as best they could with daily video chats and texts, but on show nights, they only had a few minutes between Jem finishing work and River getting ready. After a show, River was wired and not a great conversationalist; everything came out all at once and he barely let Jem get a word in edgewise, even though River desperately wanted to hear about kindergarten shenanigans.
“God, sorry. You’d think I’d be used to the adrenaline rush by now,” he said as he was winding down on the second Friday of the tour. “Tell me about your day. What’s the buzz around the water cooler these days?”
Jem snorted. “Oh sure. ‘Hey, I just delivered a concert to ten thousand people, several of whom have my name or face tattooed on their bodies. Tell me about the gossip in the teacher’s lounge.’” On River’s phone screen, he shook his head. “How am I supposed to follow that?”
He didn’t seem upset about it; there was no rancor in his tone. But he didn’t seem to realize River’s interest was genuine either. “Come on. I’m invested in what everyone brought to Frank’s Easter dinner.”
“Well, Cathy bungled the deviled eggs, so that’s all everyone’s been talking about. Aside from my love life, obviously.”
River didn’t bother to resist the smile, just put his chin in his hand and batted his eyelashes. “Aww, are we the prime topic of conversation? Scandalous.”
“Jason did a dramatic reading of that latest article,” Jem said wryly. “Tori applauded.”
“Did she get a video for me?”
Jem gave an exaggerated pout. “I thought I was the only one you wanted video of.”
River brightened. “Are you offering?” So far he’d had no luck on that front. Understandably, Jem was paranoid about pornographic images of himself being leaked online, since that would derail his kindergarten teacher career. Amanda probably would’ve said River could care more about the possibility himself, but it wasn’t likely to hurt his image.
He knew several people who’d had “accidental” leaks on purpose. So.
“Still no,” Jem said. He sounded vaguely apologetic. “You’ll just have to wait for the real thing.”
Now it was River’s turn to be dramatic. “Fine. But it’s a good thing school will be out by the time this tour’s over. I’m not letting you out of bed for a week.”
That was as long as his brain would let him focus on a conversation. His body was still thrumming with adrenaline, and he needed to burn it off before he could do anything productive, like interact with people in a meaningful way, or sleep.
Post-concert, he never needed Grace to motivate him to exercise.
Eric and Ward were already in the hotel gym, pacing away on their treadmills. River took the elliptical machine and gave them a half wave, then stuck his headphones in and closed his eyes.
The playlist was key to the process. He had to concentrate on matching his rhythm to the beat, or he’d work too fast and make the whole adrenaline thing worse. The idea was to get his brain and body to slow down, not amp up.
Then he and the boys sat in the hot tub for ten minutes, because they were old men now and they needed to be able to move without pain tomorrow.
They never did any of this when they were younger, of course. It was all after-parties and dancing and drugs and sex and whatever else they thought touring musicians did after a successful show.
And then they’d each taken their turns almost destroying their lives with substance abuse or meaningless sex—River and Eric once dumped a bucket of cold water over Ward’s head when he’d partaken of too muchsomethingto make good choices—and done their stints in rehab, and now they were old and boring, but at least they were still alive and mostly healthy, and they had their families.
The gym routine worked well enough that River managed to doze off just before three in the morning and even fell back asleep twice when his body tried to lie to him about time zones.
Finally the lack of Jem in the bed offended him enough that he rolled out of it and wiped his eyes. Seven hours of broken sleep. It could be worse.
He ordered breakfast from the room service menu, lamenting that he couldn’t spoil Jem with the house-made waffles with organic fruit and whatever mascarpone was, and had just taken a bite that made him want to weep with joy when his phone chirped.
He was hoping for something from Jem—it was early enough in California that school wouldn’t have started yet—but it turned out to be Amanda, with a screenshot of his TikTok account, the engagement section circled.
