Paul Doffing has been sleeping on the floor for a while now. But not for lack of his own bed, a place to call home, or sanity. On June 20, the musician set out on a 5,000-mile tour across the country, and planning logistics – where to play, where to stay, what to carry with him, and how to fund the trip anyway – has left no time for quandaries such as sleeping in.
Typical tour rigmarole, perhaps, except for one thing: Doffing’s chosen vehicle is a bicycle.
Freedom From Fuel was born the day Doffing saw a “TED” lecture about the tar sands issue and finished reading Gandhi’s biography.
“At the end of the biography – Gandhi was trying to stop Hindu-Muslim violence – this guy shoots him at this open prayer session and Gandhi just bows to him and says ‘God bless you’ and falls over dead. There was just this total selflessness in this guy,” Doffing said.
“I decided that I might as well lay myself down for something bigger than myself.”
Throughout the 120-day tour, averaging 60 miles per day, Doffing will stop in 30 cities around the country. In addition to standard music venues and bars, he plans to play a variety of house shows, co-ops, bike shops, farms, parks, churches, street corners, and other more intimate spaces. He is also organizing ride-alongs in as many locations as possible to spread awareness about Freedom From Fuel and the environmental issues it addresses. The first began June 20 at Minneapolis’ Harriet Bandshell and ended at a kickoff show at the Fine Line.
“[The ride-alongs] are about interlacing the whole thing with our collective consciousness,” Doffing said.
“For me, I have to tour. It’s my life; it’s my career to tour. I think this provided a unique opportunity because it’s an excessively long distance… I’m hoping that by the time I get halfway around the country, or to New York City or something, that people are asking: ‘Do I really need to drive a car?’”
But as much as Freedom from Fuel is pedaled by frustration with gas prices and distaste for the negative environmental impacts of fuel production, it is still very much a music tour, a way to share a language Doffing has been teaching himself since childhood. Inspired by years of listening to his father play guitar after dinner, Doffing’s musical repertoire includes both 6-string and 12-string guitars, acoustic and electric, and a songwriting style that is much more about addressing a notion than creating songs that are fixed, that must be performed just so.
“The stuff that I’m most satisfied with is written in an instant… [My music is] about taking a shot at something – like ‘Blossom Is You’ (his debut album). Blossom is a feeling and it’s a person and it’s a concept, but it’s not a specific thing,” Doffing said, adding that when he performs, the songs often change, have a different life.
“That’s the important thing – to actually interact with those feelings again, because that gives an actual real experience.”
Still, the heart of Freedom from Fuel is where spokes and strings collide, so to speak.
“Since I started having the idea to tour, I’ve been writing a lot of music about the sense that we live in a very interconnected reality. What we do to our environment, we can’t escape from that. Whether we take care of it or not, this is our planet. This is where we live. We’re not going to get off of it. We’re not going to go somewhere else,” said Doffing.
“I just want to be a decent steward of this planet. I want to be a source of peaceful feelings in people that I interact with. That’s the most important thing.”
To learn more about Doffing, his music, and Freedom From Fuel, check out his website (http://pauldoffing.com/). If you are interested in riding along with Paul for any part of his journey, feeding him, or hosting him in your home, backyard, garage, co-op, etc., contact pauldoffing@gmail.com. You can also show support through his Kickstarter campaign.