Exhibit one. I was fifteen and a long way from home when I found out where Fiction Records — the Cure’s label — kept its offices. So naturally, I went there. I stood outside like a small, eyelinered ghost and left a note for Robert Smith. [What it said is between me and my sixteen-year-old heart.] I’ll never know if it reached him. It didn’t matter. Leaving it was the whole point.

Exhibit two. I was sixteen and I wore a wedding dress to the Wish tour. An actual wedding dress. To a rock concert. Because in my head, seeing The Cure was the wedding — the most sacred appointment of my entire life — and you dress for the occasion. I regret nothing. I threw my veil on stage and Robert caught it and floated it around. It sounds like fan fiction - but this is all true. I’d do it again tomorrow.

Exhibit three. I was fourteen. SASSY magazine ran a contest: “GET MIXED UP WITH THE CURE” and to win you had to Prove You’re the World’s Biggest Cure Fan. Reader, I won it. I wrote 365 poems dedicated to the Cure while listening to Disintegration. I also built a Cure Doll House out of a cardboard box. I painted the walls purple and tiled the floor and Iput the poetry book inside. I’m not sure anything I’ve earned since has meant quite as much. Here is a photo of me with one of the prizes from the contest.

Exhibit four. I was a card-carrying member of the Other Voices fan club, back when being in a fan club meant something — newsletters in the mailbox, a secret society of people who understood that this band wasn’t a hobby. It was an identity.

Exhibit five. I traded bootleg tapes of Cure concerts with pen pals around the world. Handwritten letters, cassettes wrapped carefully, decorated with handmade covers, and sent across oceans, whole friendships built on total devotion to the same songs. That was the internet before the internet — slower, more romantic, and somehow more real.

Here’s what I understand now that I didn’t then: that girl — the one in the wedding dress, the one leaving notes at record labels — she wasn’t just a fan. She was practicing. All that devotion, all that aching to be near the music, it was the beginning of something. The kid who would have done anything for The Cure grew up to pick up an instrument, join bands, and tour the world playing the music she once worshipped from the crowd.

I don’t think you become an artist without first being that kind of fan. The obsession isn’t embarrassing. It’s the origin story.

So tell me — what did you do for your favorite band? What’s your most unhinged, dressed-for-the-occasion, note-at-the-label fan story? I know I’m not the only one. 🖤

I’m putting this here — on Substack — instead of just letting it disappear into an Instagram feed, because this is where I want to actually tell these stories now. The billboards and the stages are the highlight reel. But there’s a whole machine behind getting here — the campaigns, the hustle, the near-disasters, the stuff nobody warns you about — and that’s what I’m going to be writing about.

If you want the real, unfiltered version of the music life — the wins like this one and the hard-won lessons behind them — subscribe. It’s free, and I’m just getting started here.

More soon.
— Jennie

What they picture is glamour, and honestly? They’re not wrong. But it’s a particular kind — the kind two lifers build when they’ve each spent decades in this life. We don’t discuss “the industry” over dinner like it’s a career. We talk about it like weather. It’s just the air we’ve always breathed.

Here’s the part nobody warns you about marrying another musician: it’s the only person who gets it without you explaining. And Jim really gets it — he came up the hard way, three kids from Long Island and a rockabilly obsession, playing his drums standing up in small clubs all those years ago before the crew, the cover of Rolling Stone and the suites over the Strip. The good nights, the bad nights, the 3am adrenaline that won’t switch off. He’s lived every mile of it.

But sometimes — like this week — I’m not just his wife on the road. I’m the opener. The Midnight Cowgirls get the first thirty minutes of a room full of thousands who came for a legendary band, and then I stand at the side of the stage and watch the man I share a bed with do the thing he’s been doing since before I knew his name.

I’d be lying if I said that was simple.

Some nights it’s pure joy — watching someone you love be great at the thing they love. But I have my own band. My own songs. My own thing I’m still, stubbornly, chasing. So under the pride there’s this quieter hum: I’m not done. This isn’t my last chapter. I’m just opening tonight. And he gets that too — that’s the whole point. He didn’t want a plus-one either. He married a bass player.

And here’s what really never makes the photos: most days, I’m the one who booked the flights. I organize his travel, run his road logistics, keep the whole machine moving — his tour manager in everything but the title. So on any given day I’m three people at once: the wife, the one with the itinerary and every confirmation number, and the one who walks out at eight to play her own thirty minutes. I keep the trains running and I’m on one of them. Nobody tells you that you can be the whole support system and the opening act in the same twenty-four hours — and want both, fiercely.

And let me be clear: this is not some scrappy van tour. The Stray Cats are legends — great rooms, thousands of people, a suite with the Strip out the window. The glamour is real. What nobody tells you is that real life doesn’t care how famous anyone is; it still shows up. So the same week that has thousands screaming his name also has me on six hours of sleep, watching my cat drop a half-dead dove on the floor like an omen I chose not to read, nursing heartburn from a hotel tiramisu. Both things are true at once. I’m trying to launch a new band, a new song, started a go fund me for a friend with cancer, attempting to make social media reels for me, my band, my husband. That’s the part nobody photographs.

But then you get to the stage, and all of it — the glamour, the exhaustion, the whole strange beautiful life — collapses into the thirty minutes that make the rest make sense. I’ll play my set. He’ll play his. We’ll find each other in the dark at the side of the stage, sweaty and grinning, and none of the rest will matter at all.

That’s the marriage. Two lifers, still at it, still opening for each other in a hundred small ways.

Anyway — we’re in Vegas. He’s got the Cosmopolitan. I’ve got the first thirty minutes. And I wouldn’t trade a single mile of it.

xoxo Jennie Vee (Phantom)

Before I ever picked up a bass, I thought I was going to write about music.

I imagined myself interviewing bands, reviewing records, maybe writing for SPIN or Rolling Stone, Alternative Press or the NME. I didn’t yet allow myself to fully dream of standing onstage—I was fascinated by the stories behind the songs, the people who made them, and the worlds they created

Me in my room age 14.

Then something happened.

I picked up a bass.

One decision quietly changed the course of my life.

Instead of writing about musicians, I became one.

Over the years, that bass took me farther than I ever could have imagined. I’ve toured the world, played with artists I grew up listening to, slept in vans to luxurious tour buses, Motel 6 to The Ritz, celebrated sold-out shows, questioned everything after empty rooms, and collected more stories than I ever thought possible.

But somewhere along the way, I realized something.

I never stopped wanting to write.

Not to report on music from the outside—but to make sense of it from the inside.

This isn’t going to be a newsletter full of industry advice or gossip.

It’s a place for stories.

Stories about rock & roll. About the ‘90s. About creativity, style, reinvention, and the strange privilege of spending a life chasing the rock n roll dream.

Some posts will make you laugh.

Some might surprise you.

Some will have nothing to do with music at all.

If you’ve ever wondered what happens between the shows, behind the photos, or after the applause fades, you’re in the right place.

In a funny way, this feels less like starting something new...

...and more like coming back to something I was always meant to do.

I’m really glad you’re here. In my next article I will tell you about the 3 people who gave me the courage to pick up the bass.

— Jennie Vee