Wingtip - PRESHOW RITUALS

In this Preshow Rituals segment, the indie artist, Wingtip, reveals what he does before taking the stage. You can check out the rituals below:

My pre-show ritual begins hours before soundcheck, when I roll over to the nightstand in my plush, mid-level hotel chain bed and unplug my phone from the weird outlet that’s built into the lamp, wondering all the while how much it would be to install one of those in my apartment. I check my texts: they’re pretty dry. Nobody I’ve reached out to about checking whether I left the kitchen lights on at home has responded. I guess fame’s price is isolation! After flipping through shaky Instagram stories of last night’s show, I do the most important thing of the day: type in “healthy food” into Yelp and set the radius to 0.3 miles (it’s important to stay lean on tour but come on, I’m not walking a mile for lentils). I scroll through the menus of the seven different places that all have weird and inexplicable puns, pondering how bad a place called “I’m Gonna Kale Myself” could be. I go for it.

After lunch, I text my agent about ticket counts for tonight’s show. This is a very important ritual, as it will determine whether or not I think every choice I’ve made leading up to this has been worth it. After getting a response that “walk-up will definitely be strong,” I think about the friends of mine who are doctors now before getting into the van to drive to soundcheck. The moment I arrive at the venue, I embody my favorite persona: the sound guy’s biggest fan. Would he please turn my vocals up in my in-ears? All good if not! Maybe he’d like to play the show instead? We have an intro that requires him to be around like 5 minutes before showtime; I have my tour manager tell him this while I pretend to be really interested in the venue’s wiring.

After soundcheck, I check the run of show and contemplate whether it’s a good idea to eat after or before. If my set time is before 9pm, I opt to eat after. Eating after a show is maybe one of the better experiences life can offer; if you’re having a bad day, I really recommend having a room full of people applaud you and then immediately having a burger. 5 minutes before I go onstage, I plug in my in-ears to my pack, check the sound, panic that I’m not hearing anything, then have my drummer gingerly grab the pack to turn it on and hand it back to me. I peek out at the crowd, hear someone say “there he is!” like they’re part of a mob looking for someone who defaced their town’s church, and take a deep breath. I pace around before jumping on stage and think about one of my favorite lyrics: go easy kid, it’s only rock and roll.

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