Keep it up.

WE often get immersed in the work of those who lived ages ago, and forget about the present. Certainly there are those of our contemporaries who have something beautiful to say, and I don’t just want to hear it after we’re all dead. But often the ones we need to discover are the ones who aren’t crying out to be noticed.

We’re always told to keep it down, but every great creator needs to learn to be loud. We’re told to go to great lengths not to be noticed and criticized, but every great artist needs to learn to be laughed at. You’re not succeeding until you’ve offended someone, made someone else jealous, made someone else uncomfortable, and made everyone else notice.

Music in the Moment

There's a moment in G. Love's song "The Hustle" (1:18 into the song) where he starts to play a harmonica solo, pauses for a second, and then laughs and says, "damn." If you play harmonica, you'll recognize that he'd accidentally had his harmonica upside down. It's one of my favorite moments in recorded music, because it's so real. You can feel the music living in the moment. I wonder if they talked about recording it again before deciding to just use the version with the flub on it. Part of me hopes they didn't even debate it.

I was going to take a break halfway through the set last night in Hollywood, but ended up playing for 2 and a half hours straight, and included a few songs that I hadn't played for a long time. We had a great audience, and I just kept going. It was music in the moment, exactly the way it's meant to be played.