My introduction to playing live music went something like this: hop on a bus with your bandmates, some of them lugging along upright basses or amps, and show up at the restaurant. Set up, warm up, acclimate to the background noise, sit down at the piano and listen to the conversation between the instruments as you add in a word or phrase, sometimes going off on your own soliloquy while your bandmates murmur in the background, making room for your solo, then tapering off again and blending in with the whole effort, all the while complimenting and enhancing the sound of an amorphous, living entity that lives only in the moment.
Playing live music, like listening to it, is a whole-body experience. I loved playing live music when I was a part of a group. Duos and trios were great, too. I could harmonize with someone else’s vocals, compliment their guitar with a mandolin, layer harmonies upon harmonies, and communicate in the moment with the other musicians, shaping and bringing to life what had been merely a skeleton, a structure to work with, breathing life into a piece of music and sharing it with a live audience. What magic - and most importantly, a song played live is never the same twice. Every performance has its own nuances, what is felt and communicated is different every time. Even the audience colors the effect and makes each performance a unique phenomenon. Participating in or witnessing live music is a singular event that cannot be paralleled through an analog or digital recording, and it is integral to developing musicianship.
Yet at the same time, another way that I developed as a musician was by painstakingly listening to recordings of songs by artists I admired, over and over. Transcribing a Duke Ellington piano solo or figuring out the chords of a song by ear is probably some of the best musical schooling I’ve had, and through recordings we are exposed to music that we would otherwise never hear or even fathom. In his book On Music, David Byrne delves into the myriad ways in which live and recorded music are completely different animals, and what he says is true, that “…the same music placed in a different context can not only change the way a listener perceives that music, but it can also cause the music itself to take on an entirely new meaning…how music works or doesn’t work is determined not just by what it is in isolation…but in large part by what surrounds it, where you hear it, and when you hear it.”
Back in my live music performance and playing days, I never even considered recording my own music. I wrote songs, but how would I even go about doing anything with them other than playing them either for a small audience or for my own enjoyment in my otherwise empty living room? I didn’t feel a need to record and distribute anything. It was the fulfillment of playing in the moment and the experience of playing in the company of others, the subtleties of performance, that thrilled me.
Fast-forward – pandemic life. It was in the throes of early covid lockdown, when I was bereft of any opportunity to play music with another human being for any foreseeable future, and at the same time grappling with a major heartbreak, that I decided to experiment with writing and recording songs. Why not? I had a laptop with GarageBand. Surely, I could figure this out.
What followed was a cathartic process of discovering the joys of recording art (albeit rather elementary). In the context of my living room, I could play everything by filtering the sound of my keyboards – bass, drums, guitar, whatever! I could harmonize up the wazoo! I had complete artistic control! It was a revelation, and I was proud of what I was able to accomplish with my debut album, Book of Song. It was simply something that I had needed to do.
Those songs are out there now somewhere in the digital ethers, but I never had the opportunity to play them live when they were still fresh and new and meant something, and these days those songs don’t interest me anymore. They are of the past. I don’t feel what I felt when I wrote them. They don’t mean what they meant then. They’re not in my repertoire. Yet, there they sit, in an obscure vault somewhere deep in the vast cellars of recorded music, and every once in a while, I guess someone listens to one of them.
Recorded music is a conundrum. At the moment, I consider it both a gift and a bane. Over the past year and some I’ve had an unexpected blast of new songs come into being, and it felt like it was time to record and release a few of them. But as I’ve worked on them, they are already becoming something utterly different than they are when I play them on a guitar in my living room, or in a café with half a dozen sets of ears. When you play live music, the moment passes, never to be repeated. A song is a story but everyone has their own experience of what that story represents. When you have a recording, the moment can literally be played on repeat, as many times as you’d like. What would have been a fleeting offering, no more than a breath, becomes eternalized. A recording is a finite version of an artistic being– one version, crystalized and digitized - it can’t be molded or adapted or plasticized anymore. It’s just there as it is. It’s a strange sensation to let it go into the world.
Some of you, as musicians, know this feeling. I’ve been laying down the vocal and a few instrumental tracks whenever I have the opportunity to hunker down in my bedroom with my extremely rudimentary DIY setup: a microphone, a laptop, and a set of headphones - block out the sounds of traffic or children running around in the background and spend hours recording and listening back to a single clean vocal track, fine tuning it ad nauseum. The thing about recording is that you can do that – you can fine tune it, filter it, polish it, pleat and lace the hell out of it if you want to. I tend to like my songs simple. I stay away from loops, I play my own instruments, unless I’m asking someone else to help me produce it, as with a few of the songs on this upcoming EP, in which case I’m thrilled to have that someone else lay down a bass line or some percussion and fine tune the heck out of those sound levels with skills and equipment that I don’t possess. For the solo songs that I’ve released in the past, I simply layer on the harmonies until I think it sounds good. I’m never quite satisfied, but at some point, a song feels good enough to liberate.
And that’s what we do with music, we release it. The thing is a recorded song is so final. Sure, you can polish and shine some of the elements in a way that maybe you couldn’t when playing live, but despite the end product being somewhat pleasing, something is lost in the translation. I suppose it doesn't matter, because once released the song belongs to the listener.
When you play live on the other hand, what you offer has immediate meaning, not only for the listener, but equally for the performer. It can be infused with feeling, expressed, and then passes on. In the case of the songs that I’m now working on recording, sure, I like them in the moment, but for me, already, the moment has passed. Still, there’s some need for my artistic integrity to express itself and let them go. I suppose, whether live or recorded, that’s the beauty of a piece of art. The meaning is ephemeral. And by releasing a song, something comes to completion. Whether live or recorded, it’s the act of sharing that matters - it’s the offering and the release.
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