Nearly every night of the year, there’s an amazing show happening somewhere — and by the time they step off stage, your favorite artist is probably feeling hungry. In the new book “Taste in Music: Eating on Tour With Indie Musicians,” edited by Real Estate’s Alex Bleeker and musician/food writer Luke Pyenson, a wide array of touring musicians write about the food they eat on the road. It’s full of funny, thoughtful, and eye-opening observations from people like Talking Heads drummer Chris Frantz, Pavement bassist Mark Ibold, Hüsker Dü singer Bob Mould, R&B visionary Dawn Richard, Natalie Mering a.k.a. Weyes Blood, Frankie Cosmos’ Greta Kline, and boygenius’ touring chef.
In this exclusive excerpt, Fleet Foxes frontman Robin Pecknold reflects on his vegan years, which coincided with the band’s first taste of success. Pecknold has a solo acoustic tour coming up this fall, beginning Nov. 14. “Taste in Music” is on sale Sept. 24 from Chronicle Books.
I chose the wrong decade to be vegan. In 2001, at age 15, fighting post-pubescent bloat and newly (though superficially) enamored of suburban punk zine ideologies, I vowed to consume no animal products, to wear no leather, to be a friend to The Animals, yada yada. I felt like St. Augustine of Hippo after his conversion by Ambrose of Milan. “I am vegan,” I announced, Lisa Simpson-like, to crickets at the dinner table. “I am vegan now. I require specific treatment in all ways.”
The small thrill I felt as my mother got up from the table to prepare me special meals should have been my first clue that this vegan conversion was more a plea for attention than a well-reasoned stand against animal cruelty. But the die was cast, and so was set in motion the next sorry decade of my gustatory life.
At first, committing to veganism in Seattle meant building an exciting and unique new mental map of the city. Hundreds of restaurants and stores became instantly invisible to me, while a small handful became essential. A new cadre of friends and role models materialized. I was raised in an atheist household, so it was ironic (yet fitting) that, aside from a few patchouli-soaked relics, the only restaurants I could regularly eat at were faith-based establishments catering to Buddhists, Ethiopian Orthodox Christians, or Jains — believers who regularly or entirely eschewed animal products on religious grounds.
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Fitting also because my veganism did in fact feel religious, providing all the sanctimony, elitism, deprivation, and stricture of the faiths that my father had railed against at the dinner table. But also the sense of belonging, morality, community, and empathy — not to mention a bevy of useful falsehoods. All important psychological needs I’d somewhat missed out on in my rational, secular youth.
My commitment to the principled, deprived life of The Vegan dovetailed precisely with my commitment to the principled, deprived life of The Musician. By the time I was 22, I was on tour, playing hundreds of shows worldwide in my band Fleet Foxes. I repeat, this was the wrong decade to be vegan. The mainstays I turned to in Seattle were nowhere to be found on the wide-open road. There may be essays in this book about some plant-based revelation a bass player had at a New Nordic temple in Stockholm, or a shockingly convincing medium-rare vegan burger at a hip street market in Madrid, but there were next to none of these joys to partake in back in 2008.
In 2008, our options were: Clif Bars, Twizzlers, “Sweet Chili Heat” Doritos (no casein!), that weird Loving Hut restaurant chain owned by an alleged cult leader, and plain pasta with olive oil. Maybe bagels with Tofutti “cream cheese” on a good day. Pickings were disgustingly slim. Daily protein requirements and nutrient macros were yet-undiscovered concepts. At the same time, that raft of gray-area questions that required satisfactory answers at home — “Do they cook the fries in vegetable oil? Are there egg whites in this? Do they butter the crust? Do they use the same grill for the meat and the black bean burgers?” — fell by the wayside on week seven of a van tour in the middle of nowhere, Mississippi.
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Touring in 2008 was malevolent and hostile to vegans, no question. But I had already loudly announced my veganism. It was My Thing. I had Othered myself from the world, from the group, from the tour. And one can’t just renounce their faith at a random truck stop once they’re sick of eating chocolate chip Clif Bars and being hangry all the time.
I was left with one small oasis in this hellish desert. The skinflint Van-Tour Nationwide Culinary Map at the time included the following restaurants: Waffle House, Pizza Hut, McDonald’s, and, very occasionally, if we had sold enough T-shirts the night before, Cracker Barrel. It also included Subway.
My savior and my destroyer became the Subway “Veggie Patty,” a gray-brown mélange of unidentifiable vegetal ingredients, damp from the microwave. Mouthfeel of sieved paper pulp or marinated sponge. Flavor nonexistent-to-net-negative; it was so powerfully anti-flavor that it siphoned and destroyed the flavor of anything surrounding it. Just a volume of calories, a shape, a wet wallet of mashed peas and binding agent around which I’d pile lettuce, spinach, carrots, salt and pepper, and oil and vinegar, all encased in a sleeve of dubious bread.
This sandwich was my go-to, most every day, for months. My sad friend, the Veggie Patty. We had a codependent relationship in which we validated and amplified each other’s deep flaws and misconceptions. Each afternoon, I’d emerge from a new gas station Subway with a fresh Veggie Patty footlong serving as my self-flagellation bludgeon and cross to bear. I’d intuit subliminal eye-rolls from the rest of the band, each gnawing on Slim Jims or (for all I knew) drinking fortifying meat slurry. Between soundcheck and show time, they would deadlift guitar amps while I counted the malnutrition spots on my fingernails.
I imagine one reason this book exists is to illuminate just how important food can be to keeping the vibe going on tour. Seeking out new restaurants or novel regional dishes can be the best part of a touring day, especially conducive to bonding and blowing off steam after hours spent hauling gear, driving, or performing in similarly mundane spaces day after day. An eye for food can turn touring into a great communal scavenger hunt when otherwise it can be an exhausting, repetitive slog. I spent years missing out on this release early in our touring career, and it’s my main regret from back then. It was mostly just me and my floppy Veggie Patty sandwich, like a couple of anti-social tweakers in the sleeping loft, freebasing sanctimony.
Once my five years of relentless early-twenties touring came to an end in 2012, I gave up on veganism. I reasoned that 11 years was enough, and that I had done my time in the Animal Suffering Reduction penal colony. These days, the vegan landscape has changed dramatically since the beginning of my career. I’m on tour now with many vegans who seem to be getting by just fine nutritionally and who report back on the mind-blowing restaurants they find in even the smallest cities.
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Despite my comfortable omnivorous lifestyle, the Veggie Patty — whether from nostalgia, or something more sinister — occasionally still beckons. I had it again recently for the first time in years. It was gross as ever, but this time I knew something I didn’t back then: It wasn’t even vegan.
Excerpted from “Taste in Music: Eating on Tour with Indie Musicians” by Alex Bleeker & Luke Pyenson, © 2024. Published by Chronicle Books.
