Category: Updates

(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).

As we head into the spring, I’ve finally got round to implementing a thing I’ve been meaning to do for ages – making four one-hour lessons a week available at a lower rate than my usual teaching rate, for people who can’t otherwise afford it or would otherwise struggle to access music tuition.

So, if you’re a full or part-time student, if you’re a full time musician who’s just trying to work on their craft while hustling to pay the bills, if you’re a disabled musician, from a minority background, unemployed or on a low wage, send me a message and we’ll see if we can work something out. It’ll be on a sliding scale, depending on the circumstances.

Lessons can be weekly, every other week, or monthly, and can be scheduled for either daytime or evenings. As well as bass, I offer tuition in improvisation and looping/live sound design. 

If you’re interested in lessons and aren’t in the category for subsidy, that’s OK too – just head to my teaching page for more info and we’ll get you booked in 🙂

OK, before reading or watching this from me, I’d recommend reading Dr Stacey Patton’s thoughts on this both on her Facebook and on Substack. She’s has a PhD in African American History, and has studied protests as part of her work. So yeah, way more qualified than me to speak on this…

This is part 1 of two versions of basically the same idea – the other one is a video that’ll be in the post after this (once I’ve got it off my phone and uploaded it to Flickr) with a transcript…

But here’s the blog post I wrote initially as a script for a video, but realised I was no good at reading scripts so just freestyled the video and ended up with two versions 🤷🏽

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I’ve been thinking about protest marches, and in particular yesterday’s march against The Far Right.

I think it’s important to define what it is, ultimately, that we are marching against. I think it comes down to three things:

• Patriarchy
• White Supremacy
• Capitalism

The “far right” and even fascism are labels for the impolite manifestations of the above. As a number of scholars have suggested on social media, fascism can perhaps be best understood as a method, rather than an ideology. A brand of violent authoritarian control that can be attached to any or all of the above. So while there is absolutely a resurgent far right in British electoral politics, the “far right” behaviour that well-meaning liberals are now marching against has been there all along, it’s just that now it’s impacting white people.  Continue reading “Thoughts on the Purpose and Effectiveness of Protest Marches”

I’ve been posting video over on Instagram and Facebook over the past few weeks, talking about some ideas around music and social media, with an unsurprising emphasis on audiences.

I’ve been trying to work out where the best place to host them for longer term access is, and realised that Flickr will host video up to 10 minutes, so have put this on my account there to test this out. Here’s some thoughts on why Social Media algorithms interfere with the way we communicate as musicians with our audience… Would love to know your thoughts in the comments x

(here’s a transcript, for those who can’t do video – loosely edited from the autogenerated closed captions in the Edits App…)

Why do we have to talk weird just to have a conversation with our audience?

This is a thing I like to think of as the tyranny of the algorithm. Or it could easily be Pavlov’s algorithm, because the algorithm that decides what people get to see sorts it based on a bunch of really, really bizarre criteria.

What happens is that there’s this drip drip effect on the way that people talk, the way they present, the way they manipulate video in order to expand their audience and their reach

But what dies in that is.. Nuance is expansive cultural expression is the opinions of people who are unsure that everybody is wildly confident and comes across as though they’re just making these massively declarative statements about the world and edits out all the gaps see me i’m stumbling on my words because i’m not this isn’t scripted i’m just chatting and

And I think part of it is that we’ve lost the joy of not going viral. I don’t want this or anything else that I do particularly to go viral. I want to reach people who actually want to have a conversation, I want to reach the people that I already know. Even reach is kind of an odd word – I just want to have a conversation. I don’t talk about reaching people by going outside. I don’t reach my students. I just talk to them.

But we have this really odd relationship with the robots that intervene between us and the people who might get to see what we do, so we’re making video – and music as well, but that’s a whole other question – we’re making video and editing pictures to please robots because they might then go and show them to humans.

That’s a mess! That’s a total mess we shouldn’t be doing that.

I’m gonna try and do more video on here and I hope that you get to see it if you are watching this you’ve got this far what with two minutes 15 into this if you get if you’ve got this far please do go and join the channel on my Instagram page I don’t post it very often but I will forward these kind of things to it so you actually get it as a message I’m not going to abuse that I’m not gonna I’m not I have no interest in posting to it honestly daily basis, I don’t think that’s a really healthy thing to do because your attention should be elsewhere. I don’t need and I certainly wouldn’t thrive on you sitting there waiting for me to post nonsense on Instagram every day

However, I do want to have a conversation and I’m not going to suddenly start shaking my phone in front of my face in order to convince a robot that somehow I’m exciting, I’m not going to put makeup on as a performative thing, I just, I suppose it’s important to say at this point, no shade on the people who do – I get that if, for whatever reason, content creation is how you make your money, pay your bills, or get a political point across. I get why you’re doing that, but I’ve always had a problem with the reduction in what, the metaphor that I always use is biodiversity

Our options are narrowing, that content is all becoming more of the same and that people won’t work ideas out in public anymore because everyone’s declaring their truth and we sort of surf between ever more shouty whatever. I don’t like the idea that we are getting like that.

and you’ll notive I’m not holding a microphone – I’m not sat here with something like a tin of sugar free mints talking to it like it’s a microphone. Maybe I should, maybe then the algorithm will start to listen to me… I don’t want the algorithm to listen to me!

My camera has a mic built in, my phone does, I’m sat in a very quiet room in my hose. It’s fine.

Anyway feel free to reply to this either in the channel or int he thing if you’re more interested in having a conversation than you are in having people shout at you and pummel you in the face with their big hot takes while shaing their camera and editing it to shit

This is a FB post from Feb 13th 2014 , it just came up on my stories and felt worth sharing here.

It has implications for those of us who teach and our conversations around influence and originality, how we guide students towards the ingredients of their best artistic self.

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some thoughts bobbling around inside my head this evening.

Everything is synthetic.

At least, in the sense that word means ‘born of synthesis’. Language, ideas, art, progress, stories… the degree to which we fetishise the false notion of ‘originality’ as an objective reality, and as desirable over and above the thing itself, is not helpful. At all.

Let go: if a thing looks or feels ‘original’ it just means that no one of its constituent influences is more apparent than any other. Or that you haven’t experienced those things that influenced it. The perception of originality is a subjective observational position, not an extant embedded reality in ‘the thing’.

We build ourselves from the beauty and strangeness around us, choosing to process the things we see and experience towards our own end. Make great things with what you have, don’t freak out about the things that aren’t in your palette for building YOU. Seek out the experiences, situations, people and influences that will make you the person you need to become. None of those require fame/success/riches. All are contextual, everything is meaningful.

Being an extraordinary stay-at-home parent is way more impressive/important than being a mediocre stadium rock superstar. the metrics of synthesis are about What You Do With What You Have. And even then, the perception of those things is wholly subjective.

But let go of the pressure for everything to be new! exciting! original! unique!

Instead, be good. Be kind. Be Generous. Be thoughtful. Take every opportunity to make the world better for those around you.

One thing that I’ve been adamant about for the almost 30 years that I’ve been teaching in music colleges is that no student should ever play like they’re in an exam. The idea that the skills and awareness that they are accumulating through study should be presented merely as a demonstration of those skills to an examiner is a massively missed opportunity to frame every assessment opportunity contextually.

This has been part of how I teach bass privately for decades, to put any exercise in a context as soon as possible – to take a technical exercise away from the realm of ‘is this correct’ and into the aesthetic space of ‘is this good?’ as soon as possible, returning to the more analytical space when the contextual work reveals areas of weakness or a lack of clarity over elements of the work.

So back to exams – the work that we as teachers, tutors, lecturers put in to help the students towards true excellence is vital to the students finding the inspiration to develop a practice that doesn’t just pass assessment criteria but puts art out into the world that is worthy of attention and an audience. Every specific set of assessment criteria is an invitation to contextualise, to talk about what this means to us as creative practitioners, as professionals, as collaborators, as artists with an audience and engaged in the work of audience development. Without that context, we’re robbing them of the meaning behind the attention they’re giving to their practice.

The reasons for this are both obvious and manifold. Art produced solely to pass an exam is literally worthless, on a metaphysical level. What a moribund aspiration it is to aim solely to pass an assessment. The assessment should be a benchmark against which to measure a performance, a composition, an interpretation, the demonstration of ability to execute music to a high standard, but it’s the performance that matters, the composition that matters.

At the beginning of every new academic year I invite my students to be ‘open to the possibility of greatness’. Not as a pressure, but as a moment of recognition that greatness doesn’t happen by accident, and the journey towards it is what makes both education and creative practice worthwhile. There is zero value in intentional mediocrity.

So in what way is your work an invitation to the possibility of greatness? How are you shepherding them towards an understanding of both what it takes to be great, and what the payoff is of that work? The metaphysical purpose of showing up as your best self in a world that will so often attempt to rob you of your originality and value.

Like every area of education in the UK and beyond, music education is facing pressures of privatisation, economic extraction and the collapse of the journey of critical thinking that ought to begin in school and extend to PhDs and beyond… But while we’re in a room with a bunch of students, our task is still to try and inspire and guide them towards making meaning in the world. Anything less is a travesty.

So back to our initial frame – it’s imperative that every assessment is presented as an opportunity to develop practice, to perform, to imagine an audience and play to them. Practically this means thinking about staging, costume, introductions, entrances, exits. Make this a part of everything. There’s no reason not to.

And the associated benefit for us? We get to think about what makes OUR work meaningful, how do we perform? What are we doing to inspire them? Everybody wins.

The words below were posted to Facebook in January 2019, and are useful as an example of how my thinking about audience developed and nuanced over time. The end point of my PhD is that the subscriber audience are always present in my decision making as a non-present intended audience. The notion presented here that studio recordings are ‘for me’ is challenged, and evidenced in the commentary on the recordings that comprise the practice submission for the PhD. Anyway, there’s some good stuff in here regarding the impact of the live audience. Enjoy 🙂

Jan 16th 2019
My recorded output is divided sharply into live and “studio” recordings. The equipment and audio process are identical for them both but the presence of a live audience completely changes the experience. When I’m in the studio (such a professional sounding euphemism for “the corner of the bedroom”) my audience is me, my aesthetic decisions, my moment to moment assessment of what needs to happen to is made in relation to my own taste, in dialogue with my own history, with whatever I’ve been working on and the lingering shadows of whoever has been inspiring me of late.

But live, the audience are present on the music. I interpret their presence, I respond to who’s there, to the sounds and gestures that I’m aware of while playing, and to my projected imagining of what their experience is like. I play to them, and for them but also with them and I become them, projecting my own understanding of what my experience would be were I not the one with a bass in my hands…

Listening back to any recording is a fascinating exercise in time-shifting the audio record of that moment, live or studio, and re-experiencing it with its own extant nature as a factor instead of the sense of possibility that exists in the unfolding.

So recordings are a translation of that experience and its quite possible for something to “work” on the moment but not as a recording or vice versa to feel like a failure live and then blossom under scrutiny.

I’ve been listening to my latest solo album on the way to work this morning, which is without doubt my favourite thing I’ve ever recorded. It’s also the most “successful” thing I’ve released in many many years. I was trying to remember the experience of improvising it all and some of the performances are still vivid in my mind (aided by the video that exists on YouTube of the actual recordings)

Anyway, if you want to hear it, it’s here –
http://music.stevelawson.net/album/beauty-and-desolation – just remember that, first time through, you share the sense of becoming that I had as it emerged in the moment. Second time through, you’re experiencing something wholly new – improvised music that now exists in relation to the memory of itself.

Here’s another salvaged (and lightly edited) Facebook post, from Dec 2023. Now the dust has settled once again on the weird nonsense of Spotify Wrapped, and we can think about it without people feeling like their immediate and wholly positive desire to talk about the music they love is being undermined, let’s dig into some thinking around these two events that galvanise audience behaviour around music online and what Spotify actually represents in terms of the independent music economy.

Why I’m Not on Spotify

I’m in the fortunate position that I can decide exactly where my music goes. So none of it is on Spotify. Spotify ‘solved’ a huge aspect of music listening for listeners. It imposed a particular model of discovery on those who bought into its idea of ‘everything’ (clearly not everything, but close enough for the majority) and that became normalised through consensus. What it really didn’t solve, in fact it has made palpably worse for artists, is the question of economic viability for niche/small-scale artists.

As a place to listen to Taylor Swift and Chic, it’s amazing. The volume at which their music is streamed means that they make a decent amount of money and can, along with the extra info they glean from enhanced stats and data, pay the people involved in making the music. If your music has already made all of its money in the age of physical media dominance, Spotify is just free additional money that replaces people listening in a context where the artist makes nothing. There are no more copies of Abba Gold to be sold, but if you can monetise the listening, it’s a windfall.

For indie artists, it never worked. The Spotify model, being one that spreads out the earnings from listening over years (instead of front loading the recouping of costs with the significant per-person transaction of selling an album in any format), just doesn’t track with the costs and survival needs of independent artists. Telling someone who can’t pay their rent now that over the next 20 years, if people keep playing a record and it remains on platlists, they’ll make more than they would have on the initial release really doesn’t help. No-one can or should be expected to pile up debt on the false hope of a lottery win like that. It’s nonsense.

Why Bandcamp, but Why So Cheap?

So we need a better model, and right now the best there is for independent artists is Bandcamp. For the most part, it’s a tricky sell to people for whom their entertainment budget is already assigned to Netflix, Disney, Spotify and Amazon. That’s a big chunk of change each month, especially if you’ve got gym membership or some other kind of discretionary spending in there too. To then say ‘please buy all of this music at £8-10 per album’ makes little sense when people are struggling.

So while that’s still the broad consensus around pricing on Bandcamp, I’ve never charged that much. Individual albums are £3. The subscription is £30 a year, for more music than you’ll ever get through within that year. It’s genuinely abundant, and you get to choose the bits that feel most interesting to you, knowing that the rest of it is yours to dig into whenever you want. Happy to discuss ways of digging into the catalogue.

Why This Matters At Christmas

Christmas is a weird time for musicians. Same kinds of pressures as everyone else financially, enhanced opportunity to sell some music (CDs and Vinyl still make fabulous presents for a particular demographic, though re-pressings of classic albums are still the dominant transaction here) and for some, some much needed paying live work (Pantomine sustains thousands of British music careers through the winter.) Alongside this there’s a month off from university teaching over the holidays and into the new year, a tax bill coming up at the end of January, and the lightness of live work heading into 2024 (the beginning of the year is largely a gig desert once Panto season is done).

So, have a think about how and where you spend your money. I’m not organising a boycott of Spotify, but it’s worth having a think about the way that it was sold as the ‘legal’ alternative to file sharing but has in no way solved the economic problems that were identified (often mistakenly) during that period. It doesn’t help musicians, despite there being a few who’ve managed to make it work (this has always been the case with music economy models – it’s never been an egalitarian ‘everyone does OK’ space, but certain aspects of the ‘musical middle class’ have been decimated over the last 30+ years (Karaoke and big screen sports did the low stakes live sector in in the late 80s/early 90s, long before the internet chimed in).

Why Bandcamp Friday Matters

Anyway, if you want to help, Bandcamp Friday is when Bandcamp (despite everything, still the by far the best global platform deal for artists for myriad reasons) give their revenue share on every sale to the artists. It’s made a massive, massive difference over the last few years.

If I was on Spotify, my projected streaming stats would likely be netting me a few hundred quid, and that would be under the old system, not this new one where things that are played less than a thousand times don’t make anything. I’d be making very, very little under that.

As it is, Bandcamp pays my rent each year. I don’t make enough to live on through it, but it’s a highly sustainable model for building community around the music with a minimal audience, because enough people realise that less than a quid a week for the life’s work of an artist you care about is a helluva deal.

If you want to check out my Bandcamp subscription, click here.

Spotify Wrapped
Spotify Crapped (on artists)
Spotify (should be) Scrapped
Spotify Slapped (and not in a good way)
Bandcamp Friday
Bandcamp Payday
Bandcamp (gives us the) Whyday
Bandcamp Smileday
Bandcamp (no more) Cryday

I wrote this essay on Facebook on Jan 1st 2020. It’s weird to read things from the before-times, but this one stands up as pretty solid spiritual and practical advice. To myself as much as anyone else 🙏

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Gonna be spending some time this evening thinking about New Year’s Resolutions/Aims. The timing is as arbitrary as any other timing but we really should take any opportunity we get to reflect and redouble our efforts to live better.

Maybe I’ll write about some specific resolutions after I’ve talked it over with the family, but the one general trajectory that I’m constantly trying to refocus is deliberateness. Continue reading “On Deliberateness (Happy New Year!)”

Earlier this year I answered a question on Talkbass about playing fretless bass. It works pretty well as a stand alone essay so I’m reposting it here. Enjoy!

A few thoughts on fretless, that for the most part apply to all music making. 

Firstly, there’s no ‘cheating’ – do what you need to do to make the music be what it should be. In my experience as a teacher and player (across 30-odd years, teaching at everything from beginner to post-graduate level), the fretless players who use the lines to help are more in tune more of the time than the ones who play unlined basses. It’s a scatter-plot, and there are definitely players who have absolutely mastered their intonation on a blank fretless board, but certainly for me, I can get in tune and stay in tune way, way more consistently with fretlines. Such that I’d never even contemplate owning an unlined fretless unless it was a gift with significant sentimental value and I wasn’t planning on using it professionally.

Then, the advice about using some kind of reference is really good – can be a drone, an open string, a held chord on a piano, a massive reverb patch that lets you sustain a chord while playing over it, a freeze pedal, or a loop of you playing a fretted bass (please check the intonation of the fretted bass before looping it!  ) – unless you’re playing unaccompanied, pitch is always relative to whatever and whoever you’re playing along with. I once saw a video by a fairly well known bassist talking about the joy of fretless being the option to play it ‘more’ in tune than a fretted bass. The odd thing was that almost all of his work with with guitarists, who obviously played fretted guitars – the idea that you’d be sliding your thirds and sevenths into their true temperament positions against a guitar is just a recipe for not being in tune with what the rest of the band are up to… ‘In tune’ is a constantly moving target, and your ability to listen and respond is vital. This is also a place where lines can be hugely useful in spotting where a particular note is consistently slightly sharp or flat, and you can then play just slightly behind or ahead of the line.

Being able to listen to a note and correct it isn’t the same as being in tune from the get-go. Intonation that’s purely by ear is a recipe for playing the front end of every note slightly out. That can be an interesting effect, but if that’s not what you’re looking for, it’s worth focussing on what physical reference points help you get your finger in the right position before playing the note. Your ear can’t do that. Muscle memory can, and that can be greatly aided by fretlines. Again, not a hard and fast rule, the side dots can sometimes be enough, but I can’t ever imagine being focused enough on the aesthetics of a bass that I would make it harder to play.

The advice about developing technique in response to musical need is a good priority structure. That’s not to say that technique-led practice can’t also yield inspiration, but turning any technical exercise into a music-creation exercise as soon as possible is the best way to move from asking ‘is this right?’ (a question almost no audience member is ever concerned with) to ‘is this good?’ (the aesthetic portion of how we assess what we’re up to). That distinction is also at the root of our ability to take some agency over our creative path, and start making decisions about what we want to hear and like to hear vs what we perceive to be ‘correct’ in the eyes of some orthodoxy or other. Again, that’s not to say that correct technique is unimportant, just that it is a stepping stone towards our actual creative goals, which is making good music, making meaning, expressing ourselves and/or doing justice to the music we’re re-creating. Our technical development is likely to be most satisfying when it is at the service of a mode of music making that brings us joy, satisfaction and meaning.

Finding a teacher – fretless is a different animal, and requires a bunch of observational, process-led and quasi-philosophical perspectives to explore what it offers and how it is learned in a manner distinct from the fretted bass. That doesn’t mean that people who don’t play fretless primarily can’t be good at teaching it, just that their take on it needs to be pretty well considered – my favourite piece of fretless advice ever came from an Anthony Jackson masterclass I was fortunate to attend, when he was asked about tips for playing fretless, and he answered ‘I don’t play fretless, but if you want to play fretless well, you need to be offended by your own bad intonation.’ – in that response was a stark and deep understanding of the relationship between artist perception and audience experience, and the task of giving the listener (or whatever is hiring you!) the best possible performance, and the enhanced role of intonation in those considerations for a fretless bassist over a fretted one.

I do teach online, so if that’s useful, message me. Otherwise, just ask around and see what people come back with. I would hope that any prospective teacher would listen to your intentions before prescribing a method to help you get to where you want to be.