An Illustration:
When I was young musician, aspiring
to be a successful musician, I did many of the things that people tell you to
do: I worked hard, my band toured the country, we put together our own
releases, we practiced hard. We pounded pavement and we knocked on doors… and
on and on and on –
And it made me absolutely
miserable. It sapped all the joy and love I had for music right out of me. In
the years that followed, I was astonished as the joy and love returned. As a
Fan and as a Musician, I was happier whenever I wasn’t really trying.
Is that really so wrong? Does it
stand to reason that someone – lacking the requisite drive and ambition – cannot write a brilliant song? Of course
not – local music scenes and bedroom recordists’ laptops across the country are
littered with brilliant songs that we’ll
never hear.
Somewhere
someone is writing your favorite song – and you’ll never hear it.
An Anecdote:
From the time I graduate college
until I turned 30, I lived in central North Carolina. I was heavily involved in
the music scene – which was a statewide path that ran from Raleigh to Durham to
Chapel Hill to Greensboro to Winston-Salem to Asheville. Chapel Hill had
briefly suffocated under the mid-90’s weight of “Next Big Thing” status – but
ultimately that chatter subsided and people continued making music because they
loved it. There were bands with vans and ties to obscure indie labels, making a
reasonable go of it; There were bands that coalesced for a few shows and then
vanished into legend and back to their day jobs. But in short, it was the best
“scene” I’d ever been around, and it defined what I’d like NOS to represent:
fleeting glory came and went, and people continued to make good, bad, mediocre,
and incredible music.
In 2002, I spent a lot of time in
Greensboro. The music scene there lacked the pretension of Chapel Hill, and I
was also torned between the affections of two women who lived in Greensboro. My
friends Jonathan and Tim played in a band called Health (not
to be confused with Los Angeles bands HEALTH). Health was an oddity – a
showcase for Jonathan’s funny, heartbreaking, off-kilter, and highly personal
“love songs”. Their songs were slow burning fires – a cross-pollination of Low
and Leonard Cohen. It began as just Jonathan and Tim – playing bass, guitar, and
keyboard, singing in harmony hinged on Jonathan’s baritone vocals - delivering disarmingly simple and
familiar tunes, carried out with an almost methodical lack of style. Over the
next two years, they added more musicians and slowly adapted some Americana
elements.
One night, at Health show,
listening to one of their glacially-paced pop anthems, I thought to myself:
“This is my favorite song right
now. Not my favorite song by a Greensboro band or a North Carolina band – my
favorite song in the world. And yet, the
world is never going to hear it.”
And that last statement was true:
both Jonathan and Tim had their “serious” bands – no one outside a few small
rooms in Greensboro was ever going to know about Health, much less appreciate
their songs. The two-man version of Health made some recordings – they stayed
at my house in Chapel Hill over the two days they recorded at local studio
Polyphonic Audio (later Track and Field Recording) – though I don’t know what
became of those songs.
Over the next few years, the band
evolved, Tim stopped playing with them, they made some more recording, and then
they broke up. Jonathan married and has two kids, which undoubtedly translates
to less time for music. Sadly, Tim passed away in August 2011 after a two-year
fight with ALS. In a very real way, their band has vanished – and with it, the
euphoria I felt listening to them perform, knowing I was hearing some amazing
songs and knowing it was something singular and fleeting that I was sharing
with a very select group of people.
But I was always struck by this
thought every time I saw a Health show: in some other town there’s some other
band or individual making great music that will also disappear – how I wish I
could hear it.
No comments:
Post a Comment