After every Casamoré sunset, no matter how late it is, no matter how tired we are, Tony and I go to the same shrimp shack on the way home and buy a paper basket of fried shrimp. We split it in the parking lot. We don't talk about the set yet. We don't debrief. We eat the shrimp. That's the rule. It is approximately the most important business process this company has.
I know this sounds like a bit. I promise it is not. Here is what the shrimp rule actually does: it forces a twenty-minute gap between the adrenaline of playing and the cold post-mortem we'd otherwise dive into. Without the shrimp, we would get in the van, immediately start listing things that went wrong, and by the time we were home we'd be grumpy at each other and convinced the night was a disaster even though sixty people had just hugged us and called it the best thing they'd done all year.
The shrimp makes us shut up for long enough for the good stuff to surface. Around bite seven, usually, one of us will say 'that girl in the red hat at the front, though.' And the other one will go 'YEAH' and then we're off — trading the moments from the night that we'd otherwise have forgotten by morning because we were too busy listing the things that went wrong. The set report comes later. The shrimp is first. The shrimp is the archive.
We have a few other dumb rules like this. We never print the setlist. We never check email during a sunset. We never let anybody else carry the headset crate in from the van (long story, a guy dropped it once and I had an aneurysm). We always leave one track on the aux for the ride home that is the opposite of what we just played — if we just did a euphoric peak-time set, the ride home is the Cowboy Junkies. If we did a warm Balearic night, the ride home is Death Grips. Reset the palate. Don't carry the set home.
If you're starting anything small and running on fumes: I promise you, your version of the shrimp rule is the thing that's going to keep you in the game. Find a twenty-minute habit that happens after the work and before the self-criticism. Protect it like your life depends on it. Because it kind of does.