Taylor Hanson & David Garza Rambling Hearts Pioneertown CA

When Taylor announced another solo show in CA I was pretty set on not going. But as my friends all started feeling FOMO and planning to go, I rearranged a few of my appointments to get there as well. This was the first time I had 2 layovers domestically as getting there via Southwest was half as much as 1 layover with United.

My first flight from Hartford to Baltimore was delayed about 15 minutes and fortunately I got to the airport early because the wait for a wheelchair was over an hour! They said it was the time of day, but even when I am there at 4 in the morning there’s a long wait. I thought that Southwest adding assigned seating was supposed to curtail the use of wheelchairs when not needed, but this has been a recurring issue.

I got to Baltimore, got to my gate, and the sky just started turning darker and darker. The flight next to us had to bump 5 people off because of the storm they had to weigh less. We were supposed to leave at 4:40 and boarded almost on time, but then they stopped boarding the rest of the flight and we had to just wait because of not knowing what our new flight plan would be and needing more fuel but because of the weather they couldn’t fuel us up more at that time. The pilot then said that we would get our flight plan at the top of the hour – 6pm and I knew that it was pretty likely I was going to end up stuck in Denver because my 2 hour layover was being eaten up. Around 6 we moved to get ready to take off, but then the pilot said they had to send up 2 tester aircrafts to make sure the weather was ok. Once we got the ok from them, we were able to take off. The flight also had no wifi so we had very minimal contact knowing what connections would be in danger. When we landed the flight attendants made sure to get those with the shortest connections off first – and while he had mentioned mine in the second wave initially, he didn’t once we landed and I found out that my incoming flight was also delayed and we’d be leaving at 10:22 instead of 8.

The Denver to Palm Springs flight was pretty uneventful, but also had no wifi. When we finally landed, the door to bring the cargo items back up had its code changed and no one knew what it was, so we had to wait for Toaster while they figured it out. They had considered giving the items to us at baggage claim but fortunately someone figured it out. At midnight I was in a rideshare to the hotel which was about 15 minutes away from the airport.

Friday I tried to sleep in as best I could, knowing that it was going to be a late night and I wouldn’t have too much time to adjust to pacific time. We ended up having some time in the hotel pool and got In N Out for lunch before getting ready to head to Pioneertown for the show. We were warned that we might not have any cell signal out there so we made sure to figure out all our tickets and directions while we still were connected. [Fortunately, I did have a couple bars.] It was a 40 minute drive there and through the mountains. While there were some mountain goat warning signs, we didn’t see any. Although with how hot it was, if I was a mountain goat I’d be hiding out somewhere in the shade.

We ended up eating at Pappy & Harriets and were able to stay inside until they started removing all the tables for the show. When we stepped outside, we were greeted by a beautiful sunset and then wandered a bit through the Western set behind the venue. Doors were at 8:30, at 9 Taylor popped on stage and we thought we were going to get the show kicked off early, but he just did a little bit of a soundcheck and headed back out for the 9:30 start time.

We were introduced to Taylor’s latest project – he and David Garza performing as The Rambling Hearts and started the set with, appropriately, Rambling Hearts. In a 24 hour period, Taylor and David wrote 10 songs. David put down the music tracking and Taylor did the lyrics. Of the 10 songs that they had written, 7 of them were performed. Taylor said this performance was a ‘trust fall’. I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect with these new songs but I did like them. It seemed appropriate to be playing them in the desert as they did have a bit more americana folky mellow feel. There was a group being a bit chatty in the back of the restaurant and I was wondering if Taylor was going to say anything – he actually did end up calling them out twice, but that didn’t stop them. The down side to having locals show up to any show just because they can, I suppose. The first part of the set was capped off with Truth, which seemed appropriate to start and finish with a song off of ‘Red’ as David was involved in producing that album for Hanson.

For the second half of the show the duo performed covers – Ben E King’s Stand By Me, The Beach Boys Surfer Girl, Hanson’s Penny and Me (technically a cover), Paul Simon’s Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard – which he gave David a mic to sing along with but then neither of them were able to do the whistling part so David played it on the guitar, U2’s In God’s Country from their Joshua Tree album, HNet Member’s Only song Be My Own and ending the show with a cover of Nick Drake’s Pink Moon which Taylor recently had the honor of inducting into the Grammy Hall of Fame.

The show was being recorded both via audio and visuals, so hopefully we will have some shared clips in the future. Most of the new songs kind of melded into one in my head so I can’t give any specific notes or details about them, but I will say that Radical Kindness is by far the catchiest and even without knowing too many lyrics the one I’ve found to be stuck in my head on loop.

Saturday morning I woke up to get ready for the trek home, only to find out that my first flight was already delayed. I was hoping for a bit less eventful trip on the way home and wasn’t off to a great start. We ended up still delayed about 30 minutes but I still had just about an hour in Denver to get from one gate to the other. While I couldn’t make myself sleep on the way there, I couldn’t keep myself awake on the way home. When I landed in Baltimore, wheelchairs took so long to arrive we had about 15 minutes to get from the A terminal to the C terminal – which my wheelchair pusher told me was “very far”. Fortunately that flight ended up being mildly delayed in boarding and I made it with about 5 minutes to spare. Then once we boarded it took a bit for us to actually leave – the pilot said they didn’t have a push crew to push us back and we had to wait for them to finish with another flight first. Upon arriving at my car, I found it was making all sorts of noises and saw that the valet left it in ‘drive’ instead of putting it in ‘park’. This is actually the second time it has happened at this valet (the first time was right in front of me as he moved the car out of the way of blocking someone else who had no patience to wait for me to load up and head out) and it’s making me a bit nervous to know what they’re doing with it when it’s in the lot. I made it home at around 1am and ended up staying up a bit catching up on some work since my body didn’t register what time it actually was yet.

I am curious to see what the full Hanson shows will have in store for me this coming weekend after having done 3 solo shows and just 1 Hanson show so far this year.