Wednesday frontwoman Karly Hartzman has announced eight solo shows across the southeastern US this December, beginning in Lexington on December 1 and finishing in Boone, North Carolina, on December 11. The run begins less than two weeks after Wednesday wraps its joint tour with Mannequin Pussy.
What an ordinary announcement.
And yet, it has me reflecting on the idea that artists sometimes put way too much energy and public relations power into the "rebrand" of their personas being briefly taken out of a band context.
So much so, that the phrase “going solo” tends to invoke a bigger story nowadays. Is someone leaving? Is this a reinvention? Who's feuding with whom? Does a separate booking require a separate brand, a new visual identity and an explanation of where the band fits now?
Sometimes there is a major transition to explain. But it's also a window into how the music industry PR machine works these days, and it doesn't mean we always have to participate in that. Because "going solo" is, in effect, a narrative spin that mostly does not describe an entirely new brand, and it's not intended to rattle the brainstems of true fans.
There’s an established model for giving those activities room to coexist.
Wilco’s official shows page carries both Wilco concerts and singer/songwriter Jeff Tweedy’s solo dates. Back in 2013, the band’s website announced another Tweedy run with a single sentence: “This December, Jeff Tweedy will embark on a solo tour out west.” Then it listed the shows. The band’s own platform was big enough to accommodate its frontman performing in another format.
Plus, everyone who knows Wilco knows Tweedy, no need for more communications copy. Wasted words offer nothing to real fans.
Big Thief offers a musical version of that flexibility. Adrianne Lenker’s “From” and “Terminal Paradise” appeared on her solo album abysskiss before being recorded for Big Thief’s U.F.O.F. Both had already been performed live by the band before their solo recordings. The songs have lives in both settings, they make it work because, again, the fans know what's up.
The point here is that from a branding perspective, announcing the new trajectory of an artist venturing out to conduct solo activities is really just a way of spinning a PR narrative. It's not for the fans, it's for everyone else to talk around the fans. For artists that have a close enough, transparent enough, active enough, engagement with their own fan base, it's totally unnecessary.
It's also true that Hartzman’s announcement needn’t predict anything on the scale of Tweedy or Lenker. It's a regional run of small shows, and it may just be a scheduling solve, or a test to see if that kind of touring is viable for Hartzman. The main storyline is that the appeal comes not from the top-down publicity perspective, but from the ground up.
It's just another way to play music. You dig?
For independent artists, that’s a useful freedom to preserve. A band can be a shared musical home with enough space for its members’ individual interests. Audiences can follow those interests without needing a grand narrative about what comes next.
Sometimes the information a solo tour needs is simply who’s playing, where, and when.
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