Building Your Band

A better conversation about music, with David Loftis and Peter Bulanow

What’s my motivation?

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This story begins with the one thousandth time I’m playing “This is the air we breathe” and a simple question that actors ask all the time: what is my motivation? The point being, a good actor (and by that I mean not Keanu Reeves or Tom Cruise – as much as I enjoy their movies) can deliver the same set of words a thousand different ways with a thousand different nuances. What should inform those decisions? Luck? Or outside direction?

Musicians can do the same thing with a song. There is so much nuance in music, that if all we have is a chart, precisely what we want a song to “say” is still totally up in the air. That meaning, that motivation, can be filled in by the musician and sheer luck, or can be informed by something more deliberate.

All the inspiration I ever needed was a phone call from a producer.  Cole Porter (1891 – 1964)

If we already decided we don’t want “throw away songs“, someone should be able to fill in those blanks and precisely describe why I’m doing this song and how it fits into the metanarrative of the service. That person is the producer (informed by the service planning process).

This past Sunday, my community did a “Hungry Service”. We were all asked to come to church hungry, having fasted for some indeterminate amount of time, even if it was just breakfast. (The beauty of this kind of thing is that we’re asking people to invest themselves in the service before they even arrive.)

Let me tell you, when you do “We are Hungry” or Crowder’s “Hungry”, when you really are actually hungry, you understand precisely why you are doing the song and it takes on a significant meaning. The longing becomes much more than theoretical and the metaphors are much more concrete.

Do you have any examples of where you didn’t know why you were doing a song, or even had conflicting ideas about it, or success stories?

The price of a note

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Notes actually do mean something. They have power. I think of notes as being expensive. You don’t just throw them around. I find the ones that do the best job and that’s what I use. I suppose I’m a minimalist instinctively. I don’t like to be inefficient if I can get away with it. Like on the end of “With or Without You“. My instinct was to go with something very simple. Everyone else said, “Nah, you can’t do that.” I won the argument and I still think it’s sort of brave, because the end of “With or Without You” could have been so much bigger, so much more of a climax, but there’s this power to it which I think is even more potent because it’s held back… ultimately I’m interested in music. I’m a musician. I’m not a gunslinger. That’s the difference between what I do and what a lot of guitar heroes do.

U2’s guitarist pontificates about things so central to what we have been talking about here at BYB that what he says here is really worth contemplating.

In keyboard-land, there is a mythical figure in the progressive rock scene, well more than one, but since I’m not talking about Keith Emerson, I must be talking about Rick Wakeman. Rick, who by all estimates has a philosophy roughly opposite of the one described above, arguably considers notes much less expensive, and is often accused of lacking feel. Even though Rick’s playing doesn’t resonate with me personally, I bring him up because he has a storied career as an artist. So even if you think differently than me, you can still find much success. Ha!

But the point I want to make is that this kind of Wakeman-like-proficiency may not serve the song as well as simple playing can.

So that’s the good news, especially if you’re starting out. Yes, do work your way through a basic curriculum of getting all the chords and all the keys under your fingers. But once you do that, it’s probably more about what you take out than what you put in.