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My Page: Brett Dennen (Home Is Where The Motel Is)

This piece written by Brett Dennen originally ran in the December-January 2008 issue of the magazine.

The hardest thing about being a musician, for me, is constantly being away from home. I don’t mean to complain, because I love touring, I’m just saying that it’s hard. I love my bed, and if I am away from it for too long, I get homesick and start to lose my mind.

It makes it even harder when the motels are roadside dives with carpet stains and brittle bed sheets. The first few years on the road were so exciting that I didn’t pay much attention to the dives I was staying in, but after the excitement wore off, I realized that at the end of the day, I was falling asleep in some slummy excuse for a bed, when my own comfortable bed was spending the night without me, thousands of miles away.

One night while I was lying in bed, unable to fall asleep, and missing home, an idea popped into my brain. If my bed at home wasn’t so comfortable, then maybe I could sleep better when I’m on the road. Maybe I wouldn’t get so homesick. Right then and there I came up with a plan to make my bedroom look and feel exactly like a cheap motel.

I began by taking everything off my walls and putting up a tacky painting of sailboats and a giant smudgy mirror with a crack in the top right corner. I got rid of my record player and replaced it with a pay-per-view TV. I replaced my comfortable bed with an old lumpy mattress that sagged in the middle. This would become the bed that would condition me to sleep on the road.

Everything I used to decorate my bedroom with, I stole from various motels I stayed in. This became problematic, because not everything is as easy to throw in your suitcase as a bar of soap or a mini shampoo bottle. But I successfully managed to steal bed sheets, towels, a coffee maker, a lamp, a no smoking sign, a hair dryer, a jewelry safe, a fire evacuation sign, pillows, a sign that read “Check Out Time Is 11:00 a.m.,” and God help me, I even stole a bible left by the Gideons. All of these things came together nicely to complete my makeshift motel room.

I amazed myself with how well my plan worked. I no longer got homesick on the road. Every night, after rocking out onstage, I was eager to check into whatever motel I was staying in and climb into bed.

After a few tours around the country went by I ran into a problem. My ticket sales were increasing, and soon I was making a lot more money. This meant I could afford to stay in nice hotels that didn’t match the slummy motels I patterned my bedroom after. Determined not to let this be a setback, I upgraded my bedroom to replicate a five star hotel.

I replaced my old TV with an HD flat screen that I stole from a hotel suite in Denver. I swapped my starchy sheets with soft linen and a down comforter that I swiped from a swanky resort in Miami. In Cleveland, I was caught red-handed, by a bellhop while I was lowering a mini bar out of a tenth story luxury hotel window. He would have pressed charges, but I bribed him with two hundred bucks, some backstage passes, and all the gin from the mini bar that I was stealing. I don’t even really like gin.

The problem I face today is that I don’t sleep in hotels that much anymore. Now I sleep in a bunk bed on a tour in a bus while driving through the night to the next tour stop. So now I am in the process of making my bedroom look like a tour bus. Will it ever end? I hope not.