How good can you be when you’ve got a bad crowd?
What if someone was watching you, taking notes of what a professional does when there’s a bad crowd? Or they take a video to bring it back to class and the students are going to study your show for the limits of how good you can be even when the crowd is bad.
It’s easy to give up on a bad crowd since they’ve already given up on you.
But you’re already on stage so what could you do other than give up?
If you wanted to sing a Bad Bunny song or a Drake song for your friends…do you pick up an acoustic? Piano? Open up a drum machine on your phone?
Maybe younger generations and future generations won’t play songs for their friends since we can listen to the original anywhere and everywhere.
If the Spotify Top 50 is any indication of what is most popular, then we’re going on at least a five years of popular music that isn’t easily covered by hobby musicians just trying to find songs to learn and play for their friends.
I wonder how that will effect the staying power of the music.
Campfire songs turned into campfire songs because they were easily played, easily sung and easily shared. And it turns out songs you sing around a campfire stay with you for your entire life.
On the other hand, maybe kids will get their phones out…one on kick and snare, one on synth, one on misc sounds and one with a crazy vocal effect and jam out some 2022 hits while roasting marshmallows. That’d be pretty cool too.
I alluded to it at the end of Part One but it needs it’s own post…
Why do we so desperately want the real story the full story? What is it we are hoping for when we watch the Behind The Music about whatever our interest is?
The easy quick response is that it’s fun, entertaining and interesting. True. But I posit there’s two reasons underneath our mere interest…
If we believe we have the full story…
1. We can copy the process and expect the same result.
2. We can finally uncover what their unfair advantage was, delineate the objective differences between them and us, and have an iron clad excuse about why we can’t achieve what they did.
And depending on what was for lunch or how sunny it is outside, the pendulum swings from one to the other on a regular basis.
Don’t get distracted by trying to get the full story or by the trappings of thinking you have it. Learn what you can, get inspired, enjoy the story and move on.
»» And it turns out we all we need to believe is that we have enough of the story in order to believe we have the full story.
You’re never going to get it.
If you wanted to know the real story of how someone’s career was made, at a minimum it would be boring. With factors and situations and details so nuanced and seemingly insignificant it would be a weeks long marathon for someone to tell the real story.
And more than that, there’s even more factors that are completely unknown to the teller. People and conversations and timing and coincidences that will forever go unrecognized.
The Netflix documentary version or the autobiography or the anthology series is about the closest we get…and yet we know there’s so much more to the story. There always is.
Here’s a little example…
I was in a band called The Kicks. Our very first song placement on TV was for a commercial for Lowes. We would get asked how this came to be and would reply with some version of ‘It just kinda happened. They liked the music and it all came together’.
By saying that answer I was saving people from the having to hear the stepped up version that spans about six years…
I met Adam from across the hall in my freshman dorm.
Then Adam and I moved in with Jeff.
Jeff interned at a label in town.
I met Jordan through a friend of a friend.
We put a group together.
Jeff brought his colleage Jeremy to a show.
Jeremy brought us to the people in charge at BMI.
BMI put us on their stage at Austin City Limits.
Whitaker was walking by the stage. He liked it.
He invited us to a day party at SXSW.
We met Lynn and sent her our music.
She liked it and also worked at a tv/film company.
Lynn’s company pitched our song and it was accepted by the ad agency.
Our song was on TV a lot.
And while this storyline is probably a bit hard to follow it only scratches the surface.
For any of us, the real story is almost impossible to tell or discover. It’s too much.
It’s helpful for us to realize that we’ll never really know how the greats got to be the greats. So while it’s important and stimulating and fun to hear about the process and journey that others have been on…there’s no need to try to uncover every last detail in hopes of being able to copy the path…because the teller doesn’t even have all the information.
And if they did it would be too boring to handle.
Might as well just go back to work.
I remember as a kid reading and watching interviews of artists and inevitably they’d get asked who their influences were. The artist would rattle off a short list…usually including The Beatles.
Then I’d go listen to their music and the music sounded nothing like The Beatles.
It turns out the question the artist was really answering was ‘who are you inspired by’.
Influence has to do with things that have an effect on you…so everything from last night’s pizza, to a friend’s birthday party, to a hip hop beat you heard ten years ago that stuck in the recesses of your subconscious can be very influential.
Inspiration has to do with getting filled with desire to act, to go, to make…so last night’s pizza doesn’t fall into that category. But those artists that you listened to growing up, even though your music doesn’t sound like theirs, they’ve inspired you on a pretty deep level.
Not everything that has influenced you has inspired you.
Everything that has inspired you has influenced you.
»» And often (not always) the question the interviewer means to ask is ‘what other artists music is comparable to your own?’
…in one sense you might not need to.
If the verses and choruses you’ve been writing aren’t great chances are you don’t need to move on to writing super weird wandering seven minute songs just because it looks like intellectual progress.
i.e. If you haven’t written your Meet The Beatles yet no need to progress to writing your Sgt. Peppers
Progress has to do with destination and betterment. What’s the desired destination and do you need to adopt a new path or simply get better at the one you’re walking?