Then, in 2019, pioneering indie rock legend and one of my all time heroes, David Berman, on the verge of making his victorious comeback after a decade of reclusion, hung himself in his Airbnb while rehearsing in Brooklyn ahead of his first tour in nearly a decade. I got the news on my way to the airport to begin a tour, and – because of said tour – was unable to attend the funeral a few weeks later. A few short months later, Richard Swift, who had produced my album City Music, died of complications due to alcoholism. I read of his passing while on an airplane bound for France, the same country in which he had just been discovered hanging by the belt of his bathrobe in his hotel room. The next year, 2018 brought the death of Anthony Bourdain who, though not a musician, was more of a rock star than most rock stars, spending his days travelling the outer edges of the world. She had often mistaken her illness for weariness from life on the road. They had found the cancer too late, despite her not having felt well for a few years. The following year, in 2017, I was sitting shotgun in a tour van passing through the American South when I learned that Jessi Zazu of Nashville rock band Those Darlins’ had passed away from cervical cancer. The fire killed 36 musicians and attendees who had been trapped inside. Remember back in December 2016, when a fire broke out at a warehouse venue in Oakland called the Ghost Ship? I had never visited, but it was exactly the kind of venue in which mine and so many others' careers began. The road has taken a lot of the great ones,” he explains, before listing off Hank Williams, Buddy Holly, Otis Redding, Jimi Hendrix, Elvis Presley and Janis Joplin as examples of those taken too soon by the lifestyle, ending with: “It's a goddamn impossible way of life!” to which Scorsese echoes off-camera back at him saying: “It is, isn't it?”Īnd I suppose it can be. “Maybe it's superstition,” he says, “but one doesnt want to press their luck on the road. Robbie Robertson tells Martin Scorsese in his 1978 live music documentary The Last Waltz that The Band is calling it quits as they have nothing left to take from the road.