Two minutes on the road to Sweden and I had already begun to worry that this story was destined to be written on my tummy. (I have no clue where the Dutch expression “just write it on your tummy” comes from, but I imagine it as the kind of European exoticism you American readers find endearing. It refers — perhaps obviously — to a promising effort that ultimately proves too good to be true.)

I’d had a luminous idea to write about my wife, and about art, in the course of an exhilarating, 1,500-kilometer road trip from Amsterdam to the middle of Sweden. My job during this trip was to convey the singer-songwriter VanWyck — who happens to be my wife — as well as her band’s instruments to a gig in Värmland, traveling through Germany, where there is no speed limit, and across the bridge that connects Copenhagen to Malmö. For the first time in my life I would be an official roadie. I wasn’t merely in charge of the driving: I would also help build and dismantle, lift and position, carry and fetch — armed with duct tape and a Swiss Army knife. My writing would be full of self-mockery and rich with funny observations about my wife. Moreover, having experienced the splendor of the gig, my dispatch would be transformed, alchemically, into an essay that contained a series of pointed, even revolutionary, observations about art.

All this, I was beginning to see, was a bit optimistic.