Labor of Love
How to love labor
Original draft written in 2023
Live music has an elusive, immersive quality that is impossible to capture or recreate. You can’t document it with your cell phone. Hell, you can’t document it with a camera crew! It’s some combination of reacting to the collective emotion of the crowd, seeing the intensity of the musicians in person, and the raw kinetic energy of the impossible-to-ignore volume.
I’m writing this while enjoying that fading glow one experiences the morning after an amazing concert. Last night I saw Bent Knee at a small, but acoustically impressive venue called the Space Ballroom.
The band members met while studying at Berklee College of Music and, unsurprisingly, their musicianship was world-class. There are the proverbial (and likely literal) 10,000 hours that each member had to put in. Then 10,000 more put in by the band – which is itself an organism.
What you see on stage is an effortless precision and tightness that impresses while allowing one to forget the skill required. Genius lies in making the difficult seem easy, after all, and such is the gift of the skilled showman.
The band had recently lost two of its original members. They cited the punishing lifestyle of 13 touring years as the main drivers.
I was at the show with my high school friend Dan. He was a drummer. Probably still is if he would pick up the damn sticks.
Before the show he was reflecting on the line-up change. He doesn’t know the band members so his comments are part speculative and part self-reflective. He said, “you start approaching 40 and realize that you have no assets. It can be unnerving”.
In 2011, Dan and his brother Matt were working to realize a similar dream in another genre-bending project called HERE. They planned a small, multi-city tour along the Northeast seaboard and needed a bass player to fill in for about a week’s worth of shows while their bass player was unavailable. I got the call, learned the songs, packed the bass and set off.
The week was informative. Early in the evening we would arrive at a venue – always a small, almost-but-not-quite cozy bar with a sticky floor and names carved crudely into anything made of wood. We would load in. That freakin’ tube bass amp was so heavy. I can still remember the feeling of carrying it up a flight of stairs.
We’d find a place for our gear. Maybe perform a quick sound-check. Then the waiting would begin. What to do? You go for a walk and eventually end up at the bar. Chat with the bartender. Drink a few beers. Get a slice of pizza.
Then you play a 25-minute set to an audience that has never heard of you and mostly doesn’t care. The set is exhilarating. It’s fun to lock in and become the Megazord that only exists for the duration of a performance. Afterwards you break down the gear, try to engage with a few stragglers, get in the van and start driving. Hopefully someone has an uncle in the next city and you get to sleep under a nice (and also free) roof.
Rinse. Repeat.
One week. That’s all I did and I realized it wasn’t for me. I didn’t feel healthy. I didn’t feel stable. I like routines. I like the comfort of my own bed. I don’t like driving a van. Bands will tour for months at a time. It’s an amazing feat of physical and mental will. The magic trick is that a band like Bent Knee can make that seem invisible from the stage.
After one song the singer, Courtney Swain, said: “you know that feeling when you realize you’ve been carried away and driving a little too fast on the highway and then there’s a toll booth approaching? That’s how I feel right now coming out of that song and into this break”. She was beaming and in her smile was the closest you will get to a magician revealing their secret.
Here it is: excellence requires a level of effort made possible only through love.
The morning after the show, I woke up early and had a traditional Saturday morning cartoon breakfast with my toddler. Throughout the day I reflected on all my half-hearted attempts over the past 15 years to become a better instrumentalist or to start and maintain a band. Too much friction. Too many distractions.
On the other hand, I built the studio and learned which knobs to turn and when to turn them. It wasn’t easy but not doing it didn’t feel like an option. Ultimately, I’m grateful that I spend a significant portion of my time working in a craft I love – striving for excellence and often ending my days by coming at the tollbooths a little too fast.