Laura Jawer is our merchandise seller and VIP coordinator on this tour, a job she crushes with an ease that makes my fumbling for major seven chords that much more perplexing.

This isn’t surprising - OG Allen Stone fans know that Laura’s our original tour manager, dropping out of college to join the team in 2012 and guide us through the head spinning exponential growth that saw us move from a shitty van to a tour bus in less than a year. We toured Europe twice, fired business managers, fired day-to-day managers, and she even tolerated a certain unnamed guitar player’s indefensible bowl cut.

She came into the job with zero experience, was supported by people with seemingly even less, and somehow crushed a workload that’d flatten most veteran TMs. She was 22 years old.

Laura’s a fantastic listener, and is therefore burdened with the thing all fantastic listeners know - being the first point of contact for stream of consciousness, ill-defined malcontent. And many’s a time we’ve gone on a walk, thrown a tennis ball for her adorable pooch, and there I go venting again.

Laura’s also fantastically wise, and kind, and is therefore burdened with the thing all fantastically wise and kind people know - that it’s better, almost always, to tell the truth. So Laura tells me when I’m being an asshole. She also tells me she believes in me. And I believe her.

Laura’s one of my dearest friends, her partner Steve Libby’s my hero, and they’re everything I want to be when I grow up.

And I promise I’ll get that shit out of your basement at the end of this tour. I mean, it’s only been three years.