OBITUARY: The "HOMECOMING" Tour
of The Halfmoon Apartments

It is my regretful duty to inform whoever is still reading these pages — and I know some of you are still reading — that The Halfmoon Apartments' long-promised "HOMECOMING" Reunion Tour has, as of last Wednesday, ceased to exist. A reunion tour does not simply cancel. A reunion tour is cancelled. By parties unknown. For reasons that are, if you look closely, not unknown at all.

The official statement was twelve words long. Twelve. It cited "logistical issues with venue insurance underwriters" and wished us all "a peaceful summer." I have been writing about this band for seventeen years and I can tell you with absolute certainty that nothing in the orbit of The Halfmoon Apartments has ever, in its entire recorded history, been described in twelve words.

What we are being told

We are being told that the tour is "postponed indefinitely." We are being told that ticketholders should expect refunds "in due course." We are being told that the band is "doing well" and is "looking forward to other projects." Each of these statements is technically true, and that is the worst kind of true. The kind of true that has been negotiated.

A photograph I am not allowed to show you

If you have seen this photograph — and you know which photograph — you already know what I'm about to say. There are five people in the band in that picture. There have never been more than four. There have never been fewer than four. And yet. And yet.

What I have pieced together

From listening sessions, from tour pamphlets, from the long unreliable threads of fan-board posts in the early aughts, from one (1) postcard received in 2011, from B-sides that appeared on the Japanese press of Cottonwood Crescent but on no other pressing anywhere — from all of this I can offer the following, for your private review:

1. The band did not, technically, break up in 2008. The band was paused.
2. The pause was not voluntary. The pause was a condition of release.
3. Release from a contractual arrangement the band entered into around the time of the second EP, which — and this is the part I keep coming back to — was recorded in a basement that did not, at any point I have been able to verify, exist above ground.
4. The "HOMECOMING" Tour was not a reunion. The "HOMECOMING" Tour was, depending on who you ask, a delivery, a retrieval, or a final payment.
5. It was cancelled because, somewhere between the press release and the truck routing, somebody noticed.

The setlist they will not play

Look at track six. Track six is on every printed setlist for every cancelled date — Burlington, Asheville, Lawrence, the half-night in Sault Ste. Marie. Track six has no recorded title. Track six is six minutes and fourteen seconds, every time. The Halfmoon Apartments have never, in seventeen years of touring, released or performed a song longer than four minutes and eleven seconds. Track six is somebody else's song and it is the reason the tour is dead. Track six is what was being delivered.

What I am asking of you

I am not asking you to do anything. I am not asking you to write to your congressperson. I am not asking you to "raise awareness," whatever that phrase means in a year I am not entirely sure of anymore. I am asking you to listen to the second EP again. Side B. Headphones, the good ones. Two in the morning. With the lights on. With the front door locked. I am asking you to notice the room tone between tracks 3 and 4 — the four-second gap that the liner notes describe as "intentional silence" — and to ask yourself whose room that is, and whose breathing, and why nobody has ever credited it.

The band is not gone. The band has never been gone. The tour is the thing that died, and the tour was never really the point. Keep your refund. Keep your ticket stub. Keep it somewhere a draft can find it — somewhere it can cool. They are not finished with us, and we are not, I think, finished with him.

— filed under the floorboards, by someone who used to run a fanzine you might still have a copy of.