The thing I hate about touring is that it totally messed up my relationship with travel in general — meaning that, even when I’m on vacation now, it still feels like I’m going to work. That’s somewhat problematic for me when I’m trying to relax.

Your experience with touring, however, sounds like a much different thing. I’m wagering this because I’m pretty sure I could never be a “tour guide” for any city in which I’ve only been a recurring transient visitor, if only because the sites that I’m most familiar with — vegetarian food options, coffee shops, record stores — are not super interesting tour-guide material unless you have exactly three hours to enjoy a city before soundcheck and you’re confined to a one-mile radius of a random nightclub. (Also, random nightclubs in America are very rarely zoned in neighborhoods worth exploring.) So ultimately, I feel like a fraud whenever I tell people that I’m, quote-unquote, well-traveled.

Just last night I went to dinner with a Viennese couple. Because they seemed to light up when I mentioned that I’d actually been to Austria, I felt compelled to elaborate on the point so as not to feel like a liar.

“Technically, I was only there for a day and a half,” I said. “But I didn’t really get to see much before I ran into a pack of white power skinheads on the street and decided to head back inside.” Vienna, in fact, later earned the distinction of becoming the only city in the world where my job description included dodging glass bottles while playing guitar, but I left that out of my amendment because, really, that could have happened anywhere.

So when I think about America, it’s hard to consider my feelings about a particular city without losing the plot to this kind of collected mental detritus. Winston-Salem, North Carolina, for example, could very well be a perfectly fantastic place, but I’ll always remember it as the place where a local man told me — assuming that I was white? maybe it was dark out? — that black people ruined the entire city. Minneapolis will always be the city where we played a five-dollar basement show in a snowstorm even though First Avenue offered us a grip to play a “real” show. Champaign, Illinois, will always be the place we were scheduled to play with the Apples in Stereo until two planes flew into the World Trade Center that morning. And so on.

It’s interesting because, as I write this, I’m realizing that I probably couldn’t even point out Winston-Salem on a map — much less tell you what to do there — and in the end, I think that sort of psychophysical disconnect really sums up what I’m trying to say about the American city and my life as a nomad: It doesn’t feel particularly awesome to say it, but while my feet have touched the ground of hundreds of cities, my head was often somewhere else.