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The xx's Baria Qureshi needs to catch her breath.

Just two weeks removed from the insanity of CMJ and some London gigs, the 20-year-old keyboardist/guitarist had to drop out of a show last Wednesday, citing exhaustion, and the band decided to cancel their next three shows.

They will resume their very busy touring schedule tomorrow night in Frankfurt, and one hopes Qureshi really rested up: the xx is scheduled to play over 20 dates in the month of November alone. After heading as far east as Prague, the quartet will wrap the month up 5134 miles away in Vancouver before hauling back to the UK for even more shows.

This is obviously an enviable problem for a young band to have, but it also highlights just how debilitating the musician's road can be, especially for artists suddenly pushed into its express lane. It is probably hard to overstate the number of external demands swirling around the xx at the moment, so even for a band whose music is not high in energy (both reviews and bootlegs indicate that their shows are more about precision), just getting through every day's demands must be difficult, especially with bloodthirsty music journalists waiting for them to screw these opportunities up.

After all, if it was just about the grind of playing gigs, then the members of Surfer Blood, who somehow managed to play close to 20 shows during CMJ, would surely be dead by now.