Silkworm: Seattle (Night Five)

After the initial run of shows last September, Silkworm plowed ahead in the fall with a couple shows in the southeast, then an extended run in May through the northeast. The May run began at Fitzgerald’s, which should have been perfect - 15 minutes from my house! And… I was in Vermont.

What I knew then was that they would wind up booking a west / northwest run, and I was hoping that I could make that work. Even with all of the shows I’ve ever been to, actually flying most of the way across the country most specifically to see a band was not something I’d ever done. I’d taken trips involving concerts but where other things were happening too, but this would be different.

Silkworm, as a band, could claim three homes. They started in Missoula in the 1980s. They wound up in Chicago in the 2000s. But for most of the run of the band, they were a Seattle band which didn’t sound like any other Seattle band. Joel and Tim and Andy moved to Seattle to perpetuate the band and, as the mythos goes, upon arriving, they found Michael there. I like to imagine Tim and Vicki driving something ridiculous like an Oldsmobile to Seattle, arriving, and finding this lanky guy on the corner with a bongo.

The Seattle show then would be a homecoming show, and as a fan, besides the Chicago shows, this is the one I wanted to be at.

And so Thursday I flew into SeaTac, and I got a small Airbnb walking distance from the Tractor Tavern in the heart of Ballard. I met up with my old compatriot Shivers and experienced what was, for me, the fifth night of the arisen Silkworm.

Without making this too much of a travalogue… Ballard is fascinating. Seattle is fascinating. This was my third time in the city and I’ll be damned if Seattle isn’t just so Seattle. I mean, I went to a coffee shop and overhead the barista telling someone his band had released a single last week. After the show meeting friends of friends the conversation went off to various recording studios.

Seattle as a city is at the end of things, far from other things. What struck me about Ballard is that it felt like a neighborhood at the end of the end of things. There are small factories (or at least things that seem like factories). There is a lot of water around and a lot of water-based work. But it’s still Seattle, with the coffee shops and baristas releasing singles. I don’t think those of us whose understanding of Seattle was some weird mix of watching Singles and listening to Ten could have grasped some of the peculiarities… especially how the geography is very weird, how attempts at a grid seem to be constantly thwarted. It’s not cramped the way Manhattan is, but it’s cramped in its own peculiar way, and there’s a certain anxiety in the air that, I think, is kind of like manure for the bloom of the artists.

Silkworm came to this city from even more of an outpost in Missoula, from a time when it seems like information came through oddly and selectively. I have an appreciation now for how it could be that they were out of step in Seattle but also how furtive Seattle could have been for them.

Shivers & I ate down the street at Hattie’s Hat which felt like it had impossibly been there forever. And indeed, they claim residence since 1904. Then we found we were early for doors and we went to a bar for a bit, and it seemed like a bar where stevedores used to spend hours on end.

Tractor Tavern itself, to my surprise, was a little smallish, and seemed more like a local equivalent of the Empty Bottle than a local equivalent of the Metro. I can only imagine what it was like in the 90s with bands coming through every night.

The astounding Nina Nastasia opened. My familiarity is not high and to the extent that she’s been on my radar it’s been because of Tim talking her up over the years. I’ll call her a folk singer for lack of a better descriptor, and maybe in a celestial sense her closest comp is someone like Maybelle Carter. There’s a lot of bullshit in the world and we’re all these weird flawed people trying to claw our way through it and sometimes some of us don’t claw as well as we like, and Nina Nastasia presents as someone with incredible depth of observation, the kind of depth that can only come from things having gone terribly wrong. I suspect that under perfectly aligned circumstances she’d be the favorite artist of almost every woman I know, but the thing is, I’m not sure I want the women I know to have to go through such circumstances!

Silkworm came out, and I’d describe it like this: they had a certain level of comfort with the idea of where they belonged on stage that they didn’t have back in September. Then there was some apprehension and some experimentation and they seemed to be genuinely uncertain how it would all work, and yet they were so good, so connected, that from the crowd’s perspective the idea that they would have been concerned about any of that would have seemed laughable. Of course they had it all together.

Here it was a little different. They’ve now played about 15 shows like this. I’m not just going off of observation here, Joel and Jeff both said variations on this after the show. Maybe the way to say it is that they’ve transitioned from the joy that they could do this to the joy that they can keep doing this.

The run last year, for me, was exhilirating, but also, when it was done, I felt, for lack of a better word, sated. The buildup to the shows had me going through the old albums, but in the aftermath, it wasn’t like I was tired of the music, but it did kind of feel like I was a little emotionally spent myself, which seems kind of ridiculous, but hey, I wrote the sentence anyway.

This go around, I didn’t go through the buildup. It’s like I’m able to approach seeing the band from the perspective that they’re there, instead of the perspective that it’s so amazing that they’re there… like I can be in thrall of the band instead of the idea of the band. I’m very thankful for this different kind of opportunity.

As for the performance itself - I mean, I should be mostly writing about this, shouldn’t I? - the crowd really appreciated Andy’s guitar theatrics when they came out, and I think they were leaning in to the idea of being in Seattle, though the set list wasn’t really divergent from the others. Tim’s bass sounded especially good. And I like how instead of outright closing with “The Bones”, they turned around and ended with one of the biggest rockers they could have played in “(I Hope U) Don’t Survive”.

SKWM 8/21/26
Tractor Tavern, Seattle

Couldn’t You Wait
Treat the New Guy Right
Raised By Tigers
Insomnia
Give Me Some Skin
Swings
Slow Hands
Raging Bull
Little Sister
“Don’t Look Back”
The Ram
Plain
Don’t Make Plans This Friday

Yen + Janet Forever
The Third
Pilot
That’s Entertainment
Clean’d Me Out
The Bones
(I Hope U) Don’t Survive

My battery is about to run out as I finish typing this from Revmo Choppers - a combined coffee shop / motorcycle repair shop in Olympia. Because, of course. It’s the Pacific Northwest. So I’ll finish here. More performance notes later. Because we’re on to Portland!