One Chair, Ten Minutes: The Pre-Show Pause Alicia Matthew Won’t Skip

On a Tuesday night this fall, backstage at a 700-cap room in Madison, Wisconsin, Alicia Matthew did what she does before almost every show. She found the chair.

It was already there, pushed into a corner of the green room, just as the advance email had asked. No phone charging on the seat. No bouquet, no handwritten note, no good-luck token from the promoter. Just a chair. Alicia sat down, set a timer for ten minutes, and did nothing that looked like preparing for a concert.

That is the ritual. It is not a superstition, and it is not a bit. It is a standing request that has followed her from club gigs to theaters, and it has become one of the most quietly discussed habits in her touring world.

The Request That Isn’t Really About Furniture

The ask is simple enough that it almost sounds like a mistake: one empty chair in the green room. Not a specific kind of chair. Not a throne, not a vintage wingback, not something with a story. A chair. Empty.

Alicia’s tour manager, Renee, says the request goes out with the usual production notes—load-in times, meal preferences, parking. “It’s the easiest thing on the list,” Renee says. “And it’s also the thing people ask the most questions about. They want to know if it’s for a guest. It isn’t.”

The habit started years ago in a cramped backstage room in the Midwest, the kind with a broken couch, a folding table, and a mirror ringed in old bulbs. Alicia had arrived later than planned, soundcheck had run long, and the room was full of people talking at her. She moved a stray chair into the hallway, sat down, and gave herself ten minutes of quiet. Not meditation. Not a vocal warmup. Just quiet.

The next night, she asked for the same setup. Eventually, it made it onto the rider. Now it is less a demand than a boundary—a small, portable room inside the room.

Ten Minutes, No Performance

What happens in those ten minutes is almost aggressively unremarkable. Alicia does not scroll. She does not answer texts. She does not run through the setlist or check her hair in the mirror. Sometimes she writes one sentence in a notebook. Sometimes she closes her eyes. Sometimes she just sits there and lets the building make its noises—the hum of a refrigerator, a door slamming somewhere, the muffled thump of a bass drum being tested.

“I don’t need a candle or a playlist,” she said in a recent conversation. “I need a chair and a door that closes. That’s the whole wellness routine.”

The point is not to clear her mind. The point is to stop being perceived for a minute. Before a show, everyone needs something from the performer: a photo, a hello, a decision about the lights, a reaction to the opener’s set. The empty chair is the one thing in the room that does not need anything from her. It is a place to sit without being on.

That distinction matters. A lot of pre-show routines are about adding—stretching, steaming, chanting, power poses. This one is about subtracting. For ten minutes, Alicia is not the headliner. She is a person in a chair in a room that smells like carpet cleaner and somebody else’s coffee.

Why an Empty Chair Reads as Generous

At first glance, a request for an empty chair might sound lonely. In practice, people who work with Alicia describe it as the opposite. Because the ten minutes are protected, the rest of the day is more available. She can do the meet-and-greet without watching the clock. She can talk to the opener without disappearing into her own nerves.

“She’s not hiding,” says Marcus, a lighting director who has worked several dates on her 2026 run. “She’s resetting. And honestly, it makes the room calmer. If the headliner is calm, everyone stops sprinting.”

That calm has a way of spreading. On this fall’s tour, the opening act—a singer-songwriter from Ohio—started asking for a chair of her own. Not because Alicia told her to. Because she saw how much difference it made. “I used to pace,” the opener says. “Now I sit for five minutes and remember why I’m here.”

The Fan Versions

Fans have picked up the habit, too, though usually with a twist. On message boards and at meetups, people describe their own “empty chair” versions: a parked car before a shift, a bench outside a dentist’s office, a kitchen table cleared of mail for ten minutes before a big phone call. The chair does not have to be literal. The point is the pause.

Alicia has noticed. She says she has received drawings of chairs, photos of chairs in unusual places, and at least one cross-stitch that reads “Sit Down. Nobody Needs You for Ten Minutes.” She keeps the cross-stitch in her touring trunk.

“I love that people are making it theirs,” she says. “It’s not a rule. It’s permission. You’re allowed to take a minute before the thing that matters.”

What the Ritual Isn’t

It would be easy to turn the empty chair into a symbol—a statement about fame, or privacy, or the cost of performing. Alicia resists that. She does not frame it as a mental-health cure or a productivity hack. It is not a replacement for therapy, a good night’s sleep, or a trusted friend. It is a small, repeatable action that makes a loud job slightly more manageable.

She also does not require anyone else to leave the room. The chair is not a force field. People can talk; she just will not be joining in. The boundary is gentle, but it is real.

The Chair After the Show

After the set, the chair goes back to being ordinary. Crew members stack it, move it, or use it to hold a jacket. Alicia does not need it anymore. The ten minutes have done their job.

“I don’t sit there and think about the show,” she says. “I sit there and let the show be something that hasn’t happened yet. That’s the whole thing.”

It is a small ritual, easy to miss in a green room full of cables and catering trays. But look for the empty chair before the next Alicia Matthew show. It will be there, waiting. Not for a guest. Not for a gift. Just for ten quiet minutes before the lights come up.