The Missive

Thinking about verbalizing music on a weekly basis is something I find incredibly challenging. It goes a long way towards explaining how I found my way out of the NAP on my first go-round. Yes, I also have a propensity for shitting on the parade, as it goes, and I don’t disregard the effect my approach has on the way other people do or don’t enjoy things. I can be a prick, and worse, I can be unpleasant, boorish, and overwrought. That’s not a big crowd pleaser. So, yes, attitude plays a big role. But still, having to come up with something — and a written something at that — once weekly, is daunting.

But why should it be?

Well, there’s a number of reasons.

It’s not like I’m a stranger to the world of music. I’ve been fortunate to be around the stuff for as long as I can remember. Music was in our household as I grew up, even it wasn’t a focal point so to speak. I became a musician my own damn self over thirty years ago. I have logged countless thousands of hours enjoying and thinking about music. I’ve had a small amount of luck being paid to write about music. I’ve met some amazing and very influential musicians.

But writing about music is a different animal.

What is it I want to convey? Well, it changes.

There’s trying to explain or share the experience of listening to a certain piece of music. Danny has touched on this last week. I commented on some of the difficulties I have playing the guy charged with introducing you, the potential listener, to a hunk of work. Part of my problem with writing reviews is that I don’t feel entirely comfortable being the guy who holds the key to the door. And that is because to be totally honest, I don’t hold the key. You do.

That’s why whenever I am relaying the experience of listening to a certain album to a nebulous audience of strangers I find myself more interested in imagining what it would be like to read the review rather than listen to the record. That, I leave up to you.

Then there’s the whole “personal”  bit of the equation. I have been criticized by some here in the NAP and others as well for being too personal of a writer. As a reaction, I’ve defended my writing (which was never really being challenged in the first place), but to be perfectly honest, it’s a fair point (Justin). Why would a total stranger want to come to another blog in a near universe of blogs and read the ramblings of some shut-out asshole? They wouldn’t.

Which isn’t to say I am at a point which sees me keeping the personal out of my NAP posts. Obviously, since I’m still doing it right now.

So, I recognize and fully admit that I want other people to read the stuff I write in here as well as the stuff the rest of these folks write.

Also, I have found that once you touch on the formative experiences in your musical life, and once you tell some colorful stories, and once you create some fictional tales, and once you pick a few fights, it begins to seem as though you might be running the danger of making the same decisions over and over again.

So, what then?

Well, that draws me to this.

Yes, I love the discipline of writing a weekly post. Especially considering that hopefully some of at least the NAP people are reading. And ultimately it boils down to this –

Music itself, at least to me, is a form of communication. It is perhaps a form of language, or more precisely, music utilizes a highly socialized form of language. So maybe it would be best to use an example of something I have been thinking about a lot lately.

I have played in a number of bands in my life. Most of them were usually pretty terrible in the scheme of things. Not to say I didn’t enjoy myself, or that nothing was any good. And within all those hours and hours of playing, of bouncing ideas around, of working and so on . . . through all of it, a very tiny number of those moments were well within the boundaries of what I consider peak experience.

This would be certain moments of Mike Gunn shows, as well as certain moments in practice. We certainly had our shortcomings and it would be tedious to venture there. But, when it worked, the few times when all the pieces fell together — that, was fucking unreal. And 12 years later, at our reunion show, and sorry to go too personal, but as my entire life took on a paradigm shift from which I am still reeling, I got to have a night, on a tiny stage, that was like a dream. I am not shitting you.

When I write about music, all of my passion for what I hear in those funny sounds is something I try to channel into you, the reader. If I can have just a couple more of those moments in the process of giving my words to music (or vice versa), then all the doubt is worth it.

I am glad to be writing again for the NAP. Now, how do we get more of you to read? Any ideas? Let’s hear them.