Just One Note

I didn’t choose music. Music chose me.

It’s taken me a very long time to realize that truth. It’ll probably to take me the rest of my life to fully accept it. But it’s the missing piece I finally found.

It’s the truth that resolves the ‘I really want this’ vs ‘Maybe I’m not good enough’ conflict that has followed me since I was a child. It goes something like, “Great musicians are so cool. I’m not so cool. Therefore I can’t be a great musician.”  Cognitive dissonance. The big disconnect.

I didn’t get to this truth - that music chose me – just overnight.  There have been many stops along the way like, “Would my creator really put this dream of playing great music inside of me but then dangle it out of reach?” That would seem not only cruel, but logically incongruent with a creator’s intentions. So maybe I could play great music?

I used other tactics for years to keep hanging on to the dream like this one: “Maybe there’s such a thing as latent talent. Some people have obvious prodigious talent. But are they the only ones who get to partake in the glorious feast of musical expression? What if there are others whose talent is latent? Buried, but still in there waiting to be uncovered. They just need more time and patient tending to germinate and blossom. Could I be one of those? Maybe I shouldn’t quit just yet?”

Of course, that hope would be quickly counter-attacked by the thought that this “latent talent” idea might just be a thin denial of “no talent” - that really I’m just afraid to face the fact that I just don’t, you know, “have it”.  Maybe your talent isn’t buried. Maybe it isn’t there at all.

I can clearly remember feeling sick to my stomach being on stage in a short-lived college band that played a private party.  I had learned an evening’s worth of new songs that the band leader played with ease and fluidity. But I was looking down at my hands on the guitar neck and felt so mechanical and worried about remembering song arrangements and chord changes. I felt no flow. Just fear and self-doubt. That day I felt like I had no business pretending to be a musician. Being on stage made me feel sick. But that experience was to be replaced by what I went on to discover in years of playing bar gigs.

I noticed that these shows started to follow a pattern. There were the usual pre-gig worries and checklists. Changing strings, replacing batteries, going over any rough spots in the set-list. Sweating the details. Lots of sweating. Then the gig would start.

I’d be looking around the room at these people looking at me and imagine them thinking, “Who’s this guy?” and judging whether they believed I was good enough to be there on stage. After a couple of songs I could almost see them think, ‘Well, he doesn’t suck. Maybe I’ll listen some more.’  I’d play the songs and gradually loosen up. And then at some point, it would happen.

I have my own name for it. I call it “Just One Note”.  I would enter what you can call the state of “flow” or immersive concentration. Something happens where time disappears. Your mental speed is so accelerated you don’t worry about what is going to happen next because there’s plenty of time to play the next note.  You play just one note and you are flying. It’s like being in a beautiful dream.  One of the greatest feelings ever. 

Something strange about this ‘Just One Note’  is that while time slows down and disappears, it flies faster than ever.  Many times I’d hear the band leader say, “OK folks, we’re going to take a short break. We’ll be right back!” and I’d wonder why we were stopping. Then I’d look down at the set list on the floor which had 50-60 minutes worth of songs and realize we had just played every single one of them.  How could we play an hour’s worth of music in 10 minutes?  That was weird. And pretty cool.

Through these experiences I learned to trust that on “game day” I could be someone else. I could perform at a level that my normal self couldn’t do.  Later, after some years of this, I took the next step. 

When I became a band leader/frontman and no longer a sideman guitarist, I had a whole new level of responsibility.  I had to sing and play and couldn’t just put my head down and play my guitar. Fortunately, I’ve been I able to play with incredibly good musicians so there is this bedrock right next to you and behind you.  You feel a level of support from one another. Trust. That led me to discover a power source that could be leveraged from the very first song of a show.  

I had heard the expression, “play big” before.  I imagined as a guitarist that when you’re on a big stage, you’ll do better to play fewer notes and make them count. Play simply and with power.

Imagine that you’re playing to a really large audience. How are those notes you sing and play going to translate out to a sea of people? You want to reach the ones in the back with the music so you give each note it’s proper length and space so it carries. I gradually learned to “play big”.

After a while, I landed on the next performance-state idea that I call, “Play Famous”.  Kind of the same as play big, but with an added ingredient of taking full responsibility for everything you play as though you’re famous and you’re playing famous songs so the music has its own mighty weight. You have the audacity to play famous. This works incredibly well.

When you’re on stage you’re exposed and you can deal with that fact in a few different ways. You can hide. Or pretend. Or you can stand tall and tell the truth. Testify.  People detect BS very easily. When they see the performer isn’t pretending but is actually playing “famous”, it’s electrifying.

Of course, you’re smiling to yourself as you look down and see the hairs on your own arms standing straight up on end and your skin is covered in goose bumps.  When the show ends you wish you could keep going and so does the audience.

My relationship with music has been a journey.  There are several more chapters to the story. Chapters that cover my listening experiences, my relationship with the guitar, songwriting, bands, recording albums, building a recording studio. The story is still being written and I have begun telling it. But for today, I’m going to stop where I began.

I didn’t choose music. Music chose me. I heard it and it gripped me and wouldn’t let go. The rest of the journey has been learning to trust it and let it do its work on me and through me. What a blessing.