Being in it. Finding that emotional, spiritual, physical connection to the music and thereby creating the best chance for the audience to latch on and go for the ride.
And it while can’t be achieved or found every night, the best way to cause it to happen more often is to want to be “in it” and then to keep finding ways to get there.
But the truth is artists don’t always want to be in it. It’s really tough to make the effort.
Show number one is really easy and probably the next ten or twenty or fifty are easy too. But show 250 headlining in suburban Delaware, show 542 on a random Tuesday in central New Mexico, show 1007 at a corporate event…it’s hard to be in it, but before that, hard to even WANT to be in it.
It’s hard to want to be in it enough to give the effort it takes to find a way back into the music.
And even when you have the desire, put in the effort, reconnect with the music, put your best foot forward, you might not get the result or response you hoped for. The amount of effort doesn’t guarantee the outcome.
So if the outcome isn’t guaranteed, is all that trouble worth it?
There was a tag line Gatorade used years ago ‘Whatever you do to get up for the game, stay up’.
I’ll make it a worse slogan but a better idea: ‘You have to want to get up for the game if you’re going to have a shot at consistently being up for the games. If you want to get up for the game, the method by which that happens is something that you’re going to have to find again and again…and that’s the only way to stay up’.
