The Long Wait Between Lotus Shows
Write Lotus sits with the “Space In Between”
Lotus show on 01/18/2025.
Before this past Summerdance, Lotus announced three fall dates in Michigan and Chicago. After their festival, they broadcast Cleveland and Buffalo for the end-of-year run. News of a new album and a slew of dates into the spring then hit.
North Jersey is my home. While cruising around the Mid-Atlantic and New England is no problem, I can’t just fly to, say, Colorado as many people I know can. I wish, believe me I do, but reality had sunk in: No Lotus for me until April 2026, and my previous taste was the “disco kangaroo” show on 07/03/2025. That’s more than a nine-month gap, and almost 15 months since attending a two-setter. Yikes.
A break from anything is beneficial. Like skiing for the first time in a fresh winter, skills improve, in part, thanks to the hibernation. I’ve had to rest from running. I couldn’t read for weeks. Maybe it’s no photography or no yoga for you. The return to the activity is often sweet, with an increase in direction or focus, but what of the space in between? The point isn’t to fill the emptiness just to fill the emptiness, doomscrolling aside. Rather, it’s to land in the layer where your mind feels comfortable enough to find the perspective to sustain you.
Selected Live History of “Space In Between”
Image from PhantasyTour.com.
“Space In Between” is an electronica-funk tune. Credited to Jesse Miller, it appears to have been written in 2000 before, as documented on The Travel Log, “The counterpoint between guitar and bass worked itself out while drinking wine by myself in Summer 2001.” Given the details, it’s an early original that, like countless Lotus songs, is propelled by his bass.
Unless the band has the complete live history of the cut, the data that follows is surely not 100% accurate, so the ballpark will have to do. But by adding the dates from PhantasyTour.com (76) and The Travel Log (nine prior to anything on PT), “Space” has been played 85 times. A nice, round number even if it’s rough, and I’ve experienced six of them. The debut happened on 09/21/2000 at Hacienda in Goshen, Indiana. Post 01/31/2007, the song went on hiatus until Halloween 2013. It's been performed predominantly during Set 1, with a single encore, and seen the setlist twice since guitarist Tim Palmieri joined—first on 05/13/2022, which is on my bingo card.
Upon the limited return of “Space In Between” in 2013, I was at the DC show and the two in New Haven, bookended by gigs in West Virginia that are outside my travel zone (see the table above). There’s synchronicity here, and being present for a rare track is a moment that sticks. But hearing it at three consecutive shows it’s played at, over four years, is like locating specific headgear for a LEGO minifigure in a Tupperware bin as big as a coffin. For a words guy, I get it, numbers don’t lie, but the connection in these numbers can’t be ignored because coincidence just doesn’t exist.
Lotus show on 07/03/2025.
Gaps between shows occurred when I wasn’t seeing the band as frequently as in the last decade, except for the pandemic. From November 2019 to July 2021, the sole Lotus show I attended was the Live-In Drive-In special in Philly: September 2020, otherwise the stretch would’ve been a little shy of two years. Tough sledding but we all made it, and no doubt you can relate with one of your groups, whether due to Covid or not.
What if it were something more important than shows, though? Visiting parents, for instance. To sit in that space in between requires a practiced mind, and I fall short of the target with these life situations plenty. A shot of live Lotus goes a long way to fixing that, the proverbial recharge, but now, the emptiness during the space in between is less empty. Doomscrolling does, apparently, help mollify, at least for a few seconds…and it can take only a few seconds to regulate your breath and give it rhythm. Find the whole notes and drench them in reverb to deepen the impact.
Until the next time Lotus rolls around.