Every night brought a different mattress, different pillow, and a different mysterious light blinking near the television. For years he slept wherever tours put him. Motels beside highways, promoters’ basements or hotels with heating systems that sounded like someone dragging a filing cabinet all night. The better the concert, the harder to sleep because at midnight he might still be shaking hands and selling records and at one in the morning he’d finally be alone while his nervous system remained onstage expecting what exactly? Body exhausted but brain wants the show reviewed. Then the arithmetic follows: if I fall asleep now I’ll get seven hours, now six and a half, now five hours and fifty-three minutes, until he discovered there is no better way to prevent sleep than urgently requiring it.

Eventually, alongside guitar strings, toothpaste and phone chargers, sleeping pills entered the touring kit. At first they seemed miraculous because he could take one, read for a while and suddenly consciousness dissolves. Then he began taking them more often and acquired a second problem. Now he wasn’t only afraid of not sleeping, he was afraid of the thing that helped him get to sleep. Was he dependent? Addicted? Losing his mind? Sometimes at three in the morning he’d search the internet, a brilliant choice of activity if one’s objective is to transform a sleeping problem into ten incurable diseases.

He became frightened by his own thoughts. Is this how losing your mind begins he wondered? Can you even recognize it when the instrument you use to measure madness is the same instrument supposedly going crazy. One night he began thinking about musicians who really had gone off the rails, disappeared for years, joined cults, fired entire bands because of messages received from household appliances. He looked around the hotel room and noticed his shoes were lined up beside the door, tomorrow’s clothes folded and ready, the alarm set and today’s receipts neatly collected in an envelope. Madness, apparently, was far enough away.

It made him laugh. He suddenly saw how fear orchestrated everything. One sleeping problem had acquired a forty-voice choir announcing imminent collapse of mind. He needed help sorting the pill trick, but he could also see his insomnia wasn’t necessarily evidence of catastrophe. For years he’d treated sleep like another performance he was required to nail every night: no mistakes, eight hours. Touring, taught him the absurdity of expectation. Some nights the piano is terrible, some nights you forget a lyric, some nights twenty people come, some nights a hundred and twenty, but you don’t wake up next morning declaring your career finished. He began to think sleep deserved the same mercy.