michelle branch tour setlist

Michelle Branch: The Trouble With Fever Tour

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Saturday, October 14, 2023

Doors: 7:00pm • Show: 8:00pm

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MICHELLE BRANCH VIP MEET & GREET • One (1) General Admission standing ticket with early entry* • A meet & greet and individual photo with Michelle Branch • An autographed lyric card • A VIP-exclusive Michelle Branch gift item • An official VIP Meet & Greet laminate • Tour merchandise shopping before doors open to the general public Grammy Award-winning and multi-Platinum selling singer-songwriter,  Michelle Branch  released her highly anticipated new album  The Trouble with Fever , on  September 16 , 2022 on Audio Eagle/Nonesuch Records/Warner Records.  

Branch was seventeen years old when she signed to Madonna’s Maverick Records.  In 2001, she released her highly acclaimed debut album, The Spirit Room, which featured the hit singles “Everywhere” (MTV Video Music Award Viewer's Choice winner), “All You Wanted” and “Goodbye to You”, and ushered in a new era of young women writing and performing their own songs.  The album went on to sell three million copies worldwide, and was certified double-Platinum in the US, Platinum in Japan, Gold in Australia and Canada, and Silver in the UK, among others.  Branch won a Grammy Award for her 2002 collaboration with Carlos Santana, “The Game of Love,” which peaked at No. 5 on Billboard’s Hot 100, No. 1 on the Billboard Adult Contemporary chart, and was a major international hit. Her second album, 2003’s Hotel Paper, debuted at No. 2 on the US Billboard album chart and was a top 10 hit around world.  Certified Platinum in the US, and Gold in Australia, Canada and Japan, it spawned the hit single “Are You Happy Now?,” which was nominated for a Grammy for Best Female Rock Performance (she was also nominated for Best New Artist). In 2006, Branch found success with Jessica Harp as modern-country duo The Wreckers, whose debut Stand Still, Look Pretty was praised by critics for breaking down barriers between pop and country. The Gold-certified album spawned the hit single “Leave the Pieces,” which topped the Hot Country Songs chart for several weeks, and earned Branch her fourth Grammy nomination, as well as “My Oh My” and “Tennessee”. In 2017, Branch released her critically acclaimed fourth album, Hopeless Romantic (Verve), co-produced with her husband Patrick Carney (The Black Keys). Paste said of it, “Sprinkled with gorgeous, transparent and colorful synths, Hopeless Romantic casts Branch as a newly matured lover and songwriter and is indeed likely to succeed at satisfying diehards and welcoming in new devotees.”

For additional information on Michelle Branch, including upcoming performance dates, please visit michellebranch.com

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Michelle Branch: ‘I’m Looking Forward to Standing on My Own Two Feet’

The singer-songwriter discusses her bold new album, and the distraction it's provided during a difficult period: "If I didn't have this record coming out, I would probably be in bed crying all day."

By Jason Lipshutz

Jason Lipshutz

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Michelle Branch ’s new album comes entirely from home. “We have the luxury of having this really incredible studio here,” she tells Billboard , calling from her screen porch at her Nashville house on an early September afternoon. “It was one of those things where we were like, ‘What do we do all day?’” 

Michelle Branch

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This was back in April 2020, at the heights of pandemic lockdown, and Branch and her husband, Black Keys drummer Patrick Carney, were stuck at home along with their 1-year-old son, Branch’s 14-year-old daughter and Branch’s younger sister. Living room dance parties were enjoyed nightly; bottles of wine were polished off by the adults. At some point in the quarantine, Branch recalls, “Patrick was like, ‘Hey, you want to finish those songs that you had started?’”

Michelle Branch's Friends Send Her Drunken Karaoke Videos of the 'Everywhere' Chorus

The result is The Trouble With Fever , Branch’s fourth solo album, a candid and captivating meditation on love and identity that continues the impressive artistic growth of the former teen star while arriving during a painful public moment in her adult life. On Aug. 11, a little over a month ahead of the album’s Sept. 16 release date, Branch announced that she and Carney were separating after three years of marriage, after she tweeted and deleted a note accusing Carney of infidelity while she was home with their infant daughter, who was born last February. Later that day, Branch was arrested by Nashville police for misdemeanor domestic assault for allegedly striking Carney at their home. Branch was released on bond, and filed for divorce on Aug. 15, citing irreconcilable differences; the misdemeanor was dismissed soon after.

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Branch brings up Carney multiple times when discussing her new album – it’s impossible for her not to. In addition to recording The Trouble With Fever at their shared home, Branch and Carney co-produced the album and played nearly every instrument on it together, although Branch wrote the majority of its 10 tracks on her own. After breaking through in the early 2000s with winning pop – rock hits like “Everywhere” and “All You Wanted,” Branch started dating Carney while they worked together on her excellent 2017 album, Hopeless Romantic , which evolved her wide-eyed teen anthems into mature, dimly lit grooves. The Trouble With Fever is a more lush and strings-laden rock album – although its lyrical passages that gesture toward emotional damage and betrayal (“Some people never seem to learn their lesson / I guess I’m one of those fools,” Branch admits on the bluesy waltz “You”) can’t help but land with more of a wallop following the public fallout.

To be clear, The Trouble With Fever was completed last year, long before the tumultuous recent events between Branch and Carney. (“While things have recently changed drastically for my family, I’d like to recognize that special creative time we had together in our bubble during 2020 and 2021,” Branch writes in a new press release; Carney has yet to issue a public statement since their separation was announced.) This album does not unpack her still-fresh hurt – although she indicates that the next one very likely will. As she puts it, “I have a lot of s–t I want to write about now.”

Until then, Branch will take The Trouble With Fever on the road (a two-week, eight-show tour begins in Boston on Sept. 15) and showcase a powerful project which, she tells Billboard in our below Q&A, she refuses to let be overshadowed by tabloid headlines.

[Ed. Note: This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.]

This album comes out in a couple weeks. How are you feeling as the release date approaches?

It’s very strange having made this through the pandemic, and this album has been finished for so long. We were thinking of releasing it in 2021, and then I found out I was pregnant with my daughter, so we pushed it back. It kind of feels like this day was never gonna come, and it’s bringing up a lot of really nervous excitement. I feel like anyone who is sitting on finished work – they start to go like, “Should I have done this differently? Oh, I should have added this !” It’s never good for me to sit on stuff for this long, and it’ll be really nice to have it out in the world.

Hopeless Romantic was your first album in over a decade when it came out in 2017, and then you started working on this one relatively soon after. What lessons did you learn from that album that you brought to this one?

This time there was no co-writing – there was no other human really seen! Because we were early-COVID locked down, so it was really a such a different writing process. It’s been a long time since I’ve written by myself and wasn’t going out to sessions. I love collaborating with people, and had gotten in the flow of doing that ever since my Nashville days with The Wreckers, being a part of a songwriting community. And this was the first time that I was like, “Okay, I’m writing songs by myself.” And it was nice to use that muscle again, and force myself to finish things on my own.

Was that nerve-wracking?

It was, and I really procrastinated on finishing the lyrics for some of them. Patrick would be like, “Michelle, we’re doing vocals tomorrow, have you finished those new lines?” And I’d be like, “Uhhhh… I guess I have to do this!” [ Laughs .]

But I found inspiration in a very unlikely source. David Berman, from the Silver Jews, has a book of his lyrics that’s up in the studio. And he passed away in 2019 before I ever got to meet him or got to know him. But I attended his service, and heard all the amazing people there speaking about him – and I was crying so hard, even though I never met him. 

And for some reason, he felt like the patron saint of this record lyrically, because I would sit there as we were working, and just kind of thumb through that book. Just the cadence, the way he writes, was really inspiring to me – the way that he’s just so direct. I feel like, especially in writing sessions with songwriters, you’re always trying to be clever, and find a metaphor or whatever. And I was like, “What am I actually trying to say? I should just say it.” I just feel like I learned so much by reading the lyrics, and I would often find myself, as I was writing, saying, “What would David do?”

The Trouble With Fever sounds very different from Hopeless Romantic – your last album was a more stripped-down version of your pop style, whereas this is more exploratory, with these opulent parts with a lot of strings and cello.

It was really amazing not having the option to call people in to play stuff, because it forced us to figure it out for ourselves. A lot of times I would be like, “Hey, I’m hearing this part,” and our engineer Marc Whitmore and Patrick would be like, “What are you hearing?” It forced me to find the words — “Well, I think it’s like a marimba? And it’s doing this thing?” Trying to find the language to communicate with other people, “This is what’s in my head,” was really fun and really challenging. 

I went to town on the Mellotron doing string parts – I could not contain myself. If I didn’t have young children, I could probably just sit in a room with a Mellotron and score something, because I just enjoyed it so much. And at the very end of our session, we invited this woman here in town, Casey Kaufman, who plays cello, to come over to the house and play over some of the string parts to make it feel less synth-y, and she showed up to the studio with a mask on and homemade hand sanitizer, because that’s what we were dealing with then. 

But there was a moment when we were doing the song “Not My Lover” where I was like, “God, I really want pedal steel on this.” And Patrick was like, “Well, do you want to try it?” That was one of the funniest days, because I was sitting there for so long trying to figure out how to play this part in tune, and we were just laughing hysterically at some of it, because I’d have a pass that would be okay, and then I’d have a pass that would be so terrible. It was fun to be able to create in that way, because I think you just get so used to being like, “Oh, we should call so-and-so, because they do this, and they’re gonna be great.” Instead, it made me feel a lot like when I first started playing music and recording it – “Okay, I don’t know how to do this, but I’m gonna figure it out.”

You mentioned that this album has been done for a while – I’m sure you’re anticipating that when it’s released in a few weeks, listeners are going to pore over these lyrics and try to contextualize them and guess what they’re about. And some of these lyrics are pretty unflinching and raw. What was your mindset like when you were writing them?

I’m always kind of struggling with – when a record comes out and people want to do a track-by-track, like, “What’s this about? What’s that about?” Sometimes I like there to be a mystery around what certain songs are about – someone who’s listening to a song will find a meaning in it that I find more compelling than what it meant to me when I wrote it, because everyone is going to interpret a song differently. But I mean, I always try to pull from personal experiences, because that’s just how I’ve always written. 

I have also found this weird thing that happens sometimes with songs, where I’ll write something that is kind of… on the outskirts of something that I feel going on. And then, you know, a couple of years go by, and I’m like, “Oh, wow, I actually wrote that. And it happened.” Like, I could sense that it was going this way or that way, and it became true. I don’t know. I guess it is partially an intuitive thing, of saying something that maybe you wouldn’t want to directly come out and say in day-to-day life.

I’m sure the past few weeks have been a trying experience – 

[ Laughs .] You can say that again.

Has it been difficult to focus on this album release and arranging this tour? Or has it been a positive distraction?

It has been the best distraction ever. I think if I didn’t have this record coming out, I would probably be in bed crying all day. 

It’s actually made me more excited about going out on the road and playing these shows in the next few weeks, and being reacquainted with who I am on my own, without a partner. It’s been a while since I’ve not had that creative partner with me, as far as like – going on tour, planning, rehearsing and figuring out sounds through live shows. All that stuff is so intertwined.

And seeing the amount of people who are so supportive, and ready to come out and hear these songs, it’s made me really excited to go out. I’m weirdly looking more forward to it now than I probably was, like, two months ago. Because I’m like, “Yeah, this feels good. I need this for my heart.”

I was going to ask about how much you’ve felt the very passionate support you’ve gotten online over the past few weeks — not just for everything that’s been going on, but for your music and songwriting as well.

I have felt that. And I’m really hoping this new record — I feel like there are people who still just love, love, love my first record, and keep waiting for me to redo The Spirit Room . And I’m like, “Gosh, I hope you can find a song on this new record you like!” I hope it’s not too far out there for some people to get into! Because I really loved making it, and it was really a special time for me. I’ll always think back on making this record with such fondness.

And it’s also great to get it out of the way now, because I have a lot of s–t I want to write about now. This is finally leaving the nest and making room for new stuff, and that’s always exciting, too.

Picturing you playing some of these songs live, I can’t imagine how cathartic it’s going to be for you.

It’ll be like an emotional exorcism [ Laughs .]. I’m really trying to figure out how to make a setlist for this tour and touch on my first two records, and the Santana song [“The Game of Love”], and some Wreckers songs, and Hopeless Romantic , and now the new record. How do I whittle down what songs I want to play? We’re on the road for such a short run this time — it’s different than if I were out for like a year with a band, and the sets could change, and we could learn every song. I just realized the other day, ”Shit, I only have two songs off of [2003 sophomore album] Hotel Paper , do I have to add more old songs?’ Because I do know that people are so connected to some of those songs.

Has your relationship to some of those songs changed in the past few years? Have you stumbled back into any of them like, “Oh wow, actually, this one is pretty great”?

We went right from making this album straight into making The Spirit Room 20th anniversary re-record . It was really interesting to go from writing original material to revisiting material that is so embedded in my brain. I would go to re-record it, and I would have this sense of, “Oh, this is what it sounds like, this instrument’s on there, this part goes like this.” And then I would go listen to the original and be like, “Whoa, that’s not on there. Why did I think that it sounded this way?” I had not sat down and actually listened to The Spirit Room in so many years. 

And knowing that I was close to my daughter’s age when I wrote it was a complete mindf–k. I’m looking at my 17-year-old daughter going, “Oh my God, I was writing all these songs when I was your age, it’s crazy.” But going from this brand new project to that re-record project made me just so proud of what I did at that age, what I did on my own. That’s probably the last album that I had written as much by myself until this record, so it was a really cool way to keep everything in perspective. And yeah, a lot of the songs it was like, “Hey, I really liked this song, I forgot about this.” “Here With Me” is my favorite song off that record now. I was like, ‘Oh, I never need to play that song.” And now I love it.

Considering the album release and tour coming up, and new writing ideas forming, is there anything that you’re hoping for yourself over the next few months? Any specific goal you want to achieve in the near future?

I just really feel like, having two young kids and being a mom, that’s isolating in itself, and coming out of a pandemic which was incredibly isolating, and coming out of a creative relationship that’s so intertwined – I’m looking forward to standing on my own two feet and reconnecting with myself, as cheesy as that sounds. I’ve been in mom mode, I’ve been in wife mode. I haven’t been in Michelle Branch mode for a while. And I feel like that’s gonna be really healing, and cathartic, and fun. So I’m really looking forward to it.

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Michelle Branch

Latest setlist, michelle branch on october 27, 2023.

Trouble With Fever

House of Blues, New Orleans, Louisiana

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Michelle Branch tour dates 2024

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Past concerts

House of Blues - New Orleans

House of Blues - Houston

The Factory in Deep Ellum

When We Were Young

The Van Buren

Belly Up Tavern

Fonda Theatre

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Recent tour reviews

Amazing show! Perfect mix of her older stuff and her new album! One of the last shows ever in Webster Hall under current ownership! MB was incredible live. She engaged with the audience and seemed really excited to be there. Plus, her fiance` was playing the drums! Overall, I was very impressed and disappointed that I didn't splurge for the VIP. It would've been worth it!

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She put on an amazing show!! Love her and I'd definitely like to see her again. So glad I got the opportunity to finally see her. Reliving teenage dreams! Hope she comes to TX again some time.

About halfway through the show, Michelle started talking about how long it'd been since she was on tour. She was worried when she started this tour, the venues would be empty for each show. She continued to say this has been quite the opposite, and it has been wonderful to see all the love and support. She had lots of smiles during the show, and it was obvious she was having fun! It was fun for the audience, too! Very memorable show, and such a pleasure to see her back on the stage where she shines!

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One Day, Michelle Branch Will Write a Happy Love Song

Not today, though..

This article was featured in One Great Story , New York ’s reading recommendation newsletter. Sign up here to get it nightly.

Nashville law enforcement just wanted Michelle Branch to be comfortable in jail. “I had a really cute dress on, and one of the police officers was a woman. She was like, ‘You’re not going to want to wear that,’” the singer says of her arrest for domestic assault on August 11. “Wait, I didn’t even think about that. She’s like, ‘It’s going to be cold in there. You should probably throw on some sweats or something.’”

In her mug shot, Branch’s hair is disheveled and her mascara smudged. What appears to be bruising around her eye is actually the port-wine birthmark she covers onstage and on the red carpet. “I just wish that I hadn’t been crying all night, so my makeup was at least intact,” she says now. “Someone made ‘Free Michelle’ shirts with my mug shot. I’m like, Wow, I’m going to buy someone’s mugs with my mug shot on it for my parents for Christmas .”

It’s been a few weeks since the Grammy winner, 39, was charged for slapping her husband, Patrick Carney of the Black Keys, after learning of his alleged infidelity on tour. In a Zoom call from her porch in Nashville, scheduled around her child-care arrangements, she’s wearing a white tee that reads “Tom Waits for no one,” which she bought on Etsy. She sounds drained, yet readied with a long list of remorseful talking points. “I’m not happy about a lot of the ways that shit went down that night, but I’m happy that — I don’t even know if it’s been a month and I can now be laughing about it,” she says. “It wasn’t ideal, but here we are.”

“Just found out my husband cheated on me,” she tweeted and deleted that night, before naming the woman and her workplace, “while I was home with our 6 month old daughter.” Then came the slap, which she readily admits to. According to the police report, the call came around 2 a.m., though it’s unclear who made it. After making bail, Branch released an emotional statement announcing their split, and within the day filed for divorce. (The domestic-assault case was later dismissed.)

It was a short episode of rock-and-roll drama from the woman most remembered as an earnest singer-songwriter from the early aughts, performing on TRL with a blue guitar that matched her Converse. The little sister who just missed the moment of Lilith Fair, she occupies a sunny space in the millennial heart, her Snapple-sweet voice scoring rom-com trailers and road trips.

Which might be why, when she posted about the alleged affair, 30-somethings circled the internet wagons. “You fuck with the Branch, you get the whole tree,” warned one Twitter user. Said another: “Michelle Branch hive we ride at dawn.”

That the incident came just before the release of her new album, The Trouble With Fever, and amid a summer of celebrity theatrics so complicated they require TikTok explainers, carried the whiff of a promo. That’s never been Branch’s style, though, and her impassioned statement that day — “To say that I am totally devastated doesn’t even come close to describing how I feel for myself and for my family” — was a rare thing, neither icily deliberate legalspeak nor woo-woo conscious uncoupling.

“I’m the kind of person that probably overshares. If you met me at a party, I would be telling you too much personal information in the first 15 minutes,” she says. “And that makes the internet a really hard place to be. But in that moment, I felt so overwhelmed with what was going on, and it was just my sounding board, I guess, for how I was feeling.”

Branch and Carney met at a Grammys party in 2015 — where, she’s said, they were the only ones not taking drugs — when he started a conversation wondering why she hadn’t made music in so long. At the time, she hadn’t released a solo studio album in 12 years, as she’d been locked in a battle with her label over their demand for more pop. Carney urged her into the studio and helped produce a set of songs working through her recent divorce from her first husband of 11 years (her former bassist, Teddy Landau) — and when her label predictably hated them, he offered to fund the record himself.

That intense collaboration led to love. “There’s nothing more romantic than telling someone that they’re going to finance your album,” Branch said, semi-seriously, in a 2017 podcast episode.

The album Hopeless Romantic was released to rave reviews in April 2017, and Carney proposed that summer. They welcomed a son, Rhys, in 2018, married in 2019, and, following a miscarriage in 2020, had a daughter, Willie, in February 2022. Following the explosive events of last month, they have suspended divorce proceedings for six months and are in therapy that Branch says is long overdue. She’s not ready to give up just yet.

“This doesn’t happen in solid marriages, does it? Maybe this had to happen in order for us to actually deal with our shit that we’ve been sweeping under the rug and be stronger,” she says. “That’s both of our hope. I love him. I have two beautiful babies with him. It sucks that it took this for us to actually do the work.”

(Carney’s team has not provided comment here or elsewhere, a possible indication that he’s learned his lesson on a few fronts; during his divorce from his first wife Denise Grollmus, in 2010, both parties trashed each other in the press, with Grollmus admitting to violent drunken fights and tour-related infidelity on both of their parts. “There’s a reason why there are clichés about musicians,” Branch says coolly.)

Carney produced and plays on much of the new album, which features songs written as far back as 2011 but feels like a deeply COVID-induced collection. “I found myself in March 2020 realizing that I couldn’t just drink wine and have dance parties in my living room every day, that the pandemic was not going to just be two weeks long,” Branch says. “Okay, well, now what do I do with my time? And Patrick suggested that we go in the studio.”

Social distancing meant the couple couldn’t invite studio musicians or co-writers into their home studio easily. “We had to roll up our sleeves and do everything ourselves,” says Branch, who experimented with a pedal-steel guitar, a Mellotron, keyboards, and a vibraphone, which looks like a gigantic xylophone with a pedal. “It was really cool to be able to stretch my wings and try stuff that I hadn’t tried before.” The result is an assembly of sexy autumnal music, occasionally rich with warm strings. Branch’s voice is sometimes keening in a manner that recalls Dolores O’Riordan of the Cranberries, a comparison she accepts cheerfully.

Though the album was recorded far before last month’s marital spat, it’s tempting to seek out lurking tension in the lyrics. The second single, “Not My Lover,” has verses that echo the wistfulness of Chris Isaak’s “Wicked Game” (“Try to understand / this wasn’t what I planned / It just got out of hand / a woman and a man”) before exploding into an angry, yell-along chorus about not recognizing your partner: “You are not my lover! You are not my lover!”

“I’ve tried so hard to write happy love songs, and it’s really difficult to me. They just sound so cheesy,” she says. “Maybe one day I will write a happy love song.”

Some of the songs were inspired by her first divorce, she says, as well as her single stint and the love lives of her girlfriends. “When I wrote The Spirit Room , I was writing songs about love and life, how I thought they were going to happen,” she says of her first album, released when she was 18. “And here I am with three kids, nearing 40 — I’ve been divorced, I’m having marriage drama yet again, learning life just keeps coming at you.” The weariness returns to her voice. “I’m sure that 20 years from now, I’m going to see a picture of me now and be like, You thought you knew .”

The promotion for The Trouble With Fever , aside from requiring rounds of public penance, feels like Branch’s return from maternity leave, she says, after years straight spent indoors and isolated with nursing tanks and burp cloths. “It’s like, clothes, yay! Putting makeup on, what a concept,” she says. In one music video, she vamps in elbow-length gloves, clip-in bangs, and purple eye shadow smoked to her brow bone. Her two youngest kids visited the shoot, with 4-year-old Rhys delivering a doctoral thesis of a question.

“He walked into the set and I was all dressed up and he went, ‘Are you a mom?’” she laughs. “I don’t know if they really know what Mom does, because it has been lockdown since Rhys was really small.” But they know her voice, as she sings lullabies nightly. “It was just ‘Twinkle Twinkle’ and normal bedtime songs for a long time, and then he started to get bored and I found that he’s really into Patsy Cline,” she says.

Parenting tiny people is a little more tiring in her late 30s than it was with her oldest child, whom she had at age 22 with Landau. Owen is now 17, the age Branch was when she signed with Maverick Records, and the milestone has her reconsidering her own parents’ support. “They let me move to Los Angeles on my own when I was 16 years old. Only recently I’m like, ‘What the fuck were you thinking, Mom and Dad? Really?’” she says. “My dad was like, ‘Michelle, you were going to go whether we supported you or not.’ It’s funny,” she laughs. “I want to hold onto the reins so tightly.”

She received plenty of flak from “people older than me, who made a lot of money off of me, basically” about getting married and pregnant so young, at the height of her fame. “I look back on it and realized I was looking for some way to be in control of my own life,” says Branch. She credits having a kid for “being able to keep me grounded and focused and sane during all of that.”

Grounded, and away from the paparazzi’s lenses. Branch, too, caught the documentaries about her MTV comrade and fellow young mom Britney Spears and felt relieved she’d been able to narrowly escape that experience. “When she shaved her head and was followed to that extent, it’s horrible to watch because that tabloid culture was all just starting,” she says. “I’ve always tried to not allow that kind of energy into my world, because I don’t think I can keep my head on straight. You obviously see what happens when I take to Twitter,” she cracks carefully.

Motherhood also allowed her to shed the rage she has expressed about her career not going exactly the way she had envisioned. In another memorable internet rant, posted on the message board of her website circa 2005, she complained, being “a famous musician has brought nothing to my life besides strife … I’m sick of sucking dicks to get my music heard, putting on a fake smile, and saying things that are acceptable.” Now, she deeply appreciates what that early success — platinum sales, Grammy nominations and MTV Video Music Awards, multiple collaborations with Santana, appearances on TV teen dramas like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and One Tree Hill — has and still is affording her. “I get to make whatever kind of records I want to make, and release them whenever I want to make them, and tour whenever I want a tour. This is, to me, the ultimate luxury,” she says. “I’m happy that I’m not beating myself up for not being as successful anymore. As soon as I let go of that, I found peace.”

In March, Branch was breastfeeding her daughter while watching Gilmore Girls . In a scene from 2003, Rory asks her ex’s new girlfriend what kind of music she likes. When she chirps about Michelle Branch and Matchbox Twenty, it’s played for laughs, an indicator of her vapidness. The singer playfully posted it to her Instagram, in on the joke. She no longer minds the framing of her pop past, if she ever did.

“I’ve been thinking about it a lot, because I recently rerecorded The Spirit Room for the 20th anniversary,” she says. Listening to those songs in depth, she had an epiphany that her fans have long known. “All these insecurities I had around the record — and wanting to prove myself as a real artist and not just a teen pop act or whatever — but I’m like, Damn, you made a really good record when you were a teenager! ’”

For the new record, she’s doing a quick run of shows this month, with hopes for a longer tour next year. “It makes it a little bit complicated, having a 7-month-old, to tour extensively,” she says. Baby Willie is coming along, as Carney is still on the road right now. “Playing shows is something that I need for me and my sanity,” she says. “I’m fortunate that I get to do it and reconnect with a part of me that I haven’t really nurtured for a while.”

She’s a bit worried, though, about Carney’s plans to attend her shows; her fans have pelted every Instagram she’s posted of him, stretching back years, with angry insults. “‘You’re six-foot-four and you’re going to walk into the Troubadour? You might get drinks thrown at you, are you sure?’” she says. She had seen the comments and memes, and “it was keeping me and my circle of girlfriends very entertained,” she says. “Patrick, poor Patrick, not so entertained by the shit that went his way throughout all of this.”

At the end of her Zoom session, a wooden peace sign nailed to the wall over her head, she issues one last edict about the events of August. “Violence is never the answer. I know that. So for those people online who are saying I’m abusive, I’m not,” she says. And? “Don’t slap somebody, even if you find out that they were cheating on you.”

She acknowledges the cliché that the pain will make great fodder for songs, another new instrument to experiment with. “I can’t help but process stuff in my own life that way,” she says, swirling her hands around her head. “Hopefully it won’t be a horrible breakup record; hopefully it’ll finally be my happy love songs. I don’t know. But more life lived, more stuff to write about.”

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• June 20, 1994 Setlist

Mr. Big Setlist at Vasilievsky Island Open-Air, Saint Petersburg, Russia

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• Green-Tinted Sixties Mind Play Video
• Wild World ( Cat Stevens  cover) Play Video
• The Whole World's Gonna Know Play Video
• Take a Walk Play Video
• Alive and Kickin' Play Video
• To Be With You Play Video

Note: Most likely incomplete

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2 activities (last edit by MAD222 , 3 Oct 2017, 20:28 Etc/UTC )

Songs on Albums

• Alive and Kickin'
• Green-Tinted Sixties Mind
• To Be With You
• The Whole World's Gonna Know
• Take a Walk
• Wild World by Cat Stevens

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Vasilievsky Island Open-Air

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• May 13 1994 Lindenpark Potsdam, Germany Add time Add time
• May 14 1994 The Forum London, England Add time Add time
• Jun 20 1994 Vasilievsky Island Open-Air This Setlist Saint Petersburg, Russia Add time Add time
• Jun 24 1994 Midtfyns Festival 1994 Ringe, Denmark Add time Add time
• Oct 09 1994 Tokyo Bay NK Hall Urayasu, Japan Add time Add time

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