(originally posted on Facebook on July 23rd, 2024 – this came up in my FB memories and fits so well with the processes around making these four new albums that are about to be released…)
Some thoughts on the joy of surprising myself 🙂
One of the joys of being an improvisor is that my own music surprises me all the time. Let me explain…
If you write songs and make recordings of those songs, there’s usually a sense of what those songs are supposed to sound like. Sometimes that sense is INCREDIBLY precise and a huge amount of time and energy and money goes into making it sound exactly the way the artist and/or producer envisage it sounding. Other times it’s a little looser and the musicians that play on it bring surprises and new stuff to the process, but what they do still usually fits within the shape of the song as it was intended (not always, but usually). So listening back to it mostly happens with the anticipation of what it sounded like when you went through the hundreds of listens while the track was being constructed under a microscope. (this wasn’t always the way, at all, and you’d be amazed at how many of your favourite records from before approx 1985, and a few after, were mostly one take backing tracks and one take vocals – recording a lead vocal at the same time as the band has been a rarity since the 60s unless it was a literal ‘live’ recording and labeled as such). The joy is in making a thing that lives up to the vision you had for it. It’s an incredible process that I’ve been involved in countless times and is also the process behind most of my favourite music in the world.
But I’ve heard significant numbers of artists say in interviews that they rarely if ever listen to their own recordings because they never live up to the vision they had for the recording in their head as it was being made. Everything is a disappointment. Sometimes those are records that changed my life, and the artist still feels like ‘nah, that’s not what I had in mind’ 🤷🏽
So when I get to ‘just play’, to hit record and see what comes up, sometimes only moments after adding or changing something about the pedal board – sometimes big changes, sometimes subtle ones – the music that comes out is entirely new to me. It has the familiarity of being born from the combination of my interests, skills, the things I’ve practiced and the things I’ve perfected over the years, but the combination of elements especially considering all the ways in which I build intentional surprises into the pedal-board are always new and are always far too complex in their relationship to one another for me to remember them with any degree of clarity once they’re ‘done’.
Which means that I get to listen to my own work repeatedly and be surprised by it over and over again. The music itself gets to be way more complex than it would be if I were trying to write parts that I could play the same way repeatedly (sure, it’s possible to go down the Boulez/Zappa route and conceive of and write shit that was insanely complicated and get expert musicians to play it repeatedly, but it’s so, so far from anything I’m interested in as a fan or creator that we’ll leave that to one side for now 😉 )
If things are being recorded, I can play them once in all their glorious complexity and that’s it, done. There are no edits, no ‘fixes’, no new layers added, no mistakes taken out. There is no ‘should’ only ‘is’. What you hear is what I did, and what I hear is what I did as well. Perpetual surprise and delight, as well as the inspiration to build on what one-month-ago-me did as well as what two-decades-ago me did.
140+ albums in, I’ve got a body of work that’s unknowably huge – there’s a ton of it you could play me and I couldn’t for the life of me tell you what it was called or which album it came from. But all of it offers up beautiful surprises every time I listen. And for that I’m deeply grateful 🙂 x
(I’m also, before anyone comments, hugely grateful for songwriters, especially those who include me in their songwriting and recording adventures, so this isn’t a matter of one way being ‘better’, it’s just the perfect path for my solo work).