The Key

Just a few days after 22-year-old guitarist Daniel Bachman returned to the U.S. from a month-long European tour, he’s sitting across from me on a sunny Saturday afternoon at West Philadelphia’s Local 44. Still suffering from jet lag, and nursing a hangover from a wedding in New Jersey he attended the previous night, he’s wearing the same pair of jeans, the only pair of pants, he took with him on tour. He proudly points out that he has since washed them, but there was no time for laundry during his first trip to Europe. Nasty slacks and road dirt, though, aren’t the worst thing that happened to Bachman overseas.

Nothing too terrible went down, but something strange happened in Barcelona. He played a venue below an apartment complex where the residents are notorious for throwing various things down at showgoers, hoping to shut them up. “Someone told me they sometimes throw pieces of metal down,” says Bachman, laughing at the absurd prospect. “The night I played, they were throwing water balloons, and one of them hit me. This dude said sometimes they pee in them, and sometimes they put bleach in the balloons. Whatever was in it, when I woke up the next morning the whole right side of my face was red, swollen and on fire. My eye was throbbing for 10 hours. That really sucked.”

Bachman’s fine now. He’s home. But home’s no longer Philadelphia, where he lived and worked for the past year. Continue reading →