Guitar

Native Tongues

Uh, oh. Time for some philosophical mumbo jumbo

One of the great challenges of being a musician is worrying less about how you'd like to sound, and concentrating on how you do sound. We spend years as intense listeners, trying do dredge up the ways and means to play, trying to understand the physical and mental logic of the players we admire, trying to advance. And we do, sometimes in halting steps, sometimes in leaps. At some point there is a legacy of all this music (and information about music) logged in our minds -and sometimes that legacy can be more of a hindrance than a help: too much hero worship, too much theory, too much hunger to be better (and betterer and bettererer...)

If you record and disseminate your music and/or if you play live, you have to realize at some point that you play like you play, warts and all. You're not going to turn into a carbon copy of your idol(s) one day- you do not share the same brain, hands or life- so it's time to set about being the best you that you can be. Start worrying less about what you're not good at and start worrying more about exploiting and exploring what you are good at to its fullest. We each have our own musical value systems, developed from our early childhoods and embracing those values is a kind of personal honesty -you won't go too far wrong if you're true to your inner musical child, your musical native tongue.

I remember the days of being young and insecure and vainly attempting to fit my music into the mould of what currently was cool (grunge rock). A lot of what was good about my earliest, most naive work was lost in new tones, new rocked-up material and a new attitude for which I was ill suited. Consequently, it was not long before the whole house of cards crashed to the ground and I was left thinking "What next, then?" The rest of the world would soon do the same- in our rapidly accelerating culture, faddish musical movements and their multitudinous subgenres come and go like rush hour taxis.

I started to value permanence and timelessness in music, exhausted by the constant reinvention of the pop/rock world. I turned my attention to traditional musics at that time and spent quite a few years studying blues, jazz, country, soul, zydeco, western swing -you name it- and trying to trace out North America's intricate musical family tree. (I am by no means a master of any of these genres, but I speak the common language fairly well).

Armed with all this knowledge, and playing live a lot more, I noticed something strange- I sounded a lot like I did when I first started playing, back when I was unburdened by the weight of knowing much of anything at all, and relying solely on my intuition. My basic harmonic, metric and tonal signatures were largely the same, but suddenly I had some sort of clue as to what it all meant and where it came from.

Cool! -except that I would play a trifle academically for a few years while I was sorting it all out. I had to forget that I knew some things, so that I could really know them. Theory is to music what grammar is to your native tongue- you need grammar to communicate clearly, but you have to internalize it so that it can be employed seamlessly. The same could be said about vocabulary. If you dwell too much on such things, your speech (or, um, music) can come across as over-formal and self-concious. (I know this because I am often guilty of it).

Truly great players from Satchmo to Slash capture something in the collective memory and meld it into a contemporary expression of the zeitgeist, bending their fertile minds to reshaping the sounds of their youths into an intensely personal, yet universal sound of their now (and ours). Thusly BB King channels some Satchmo, then Slash channels BB (in the freakin' "Sweet Child o' Mine" solo, no less), and a million more pimply teenagers go out and get an instrument.

I finally went out on the road at the age of thirty, and stayed there for three years. By the end of the first couple of tours, I had consolidated all the threads of my style and started to weave them together. The weaving continues of course, and will continue all my born days (thank heavens for healthy obsessions), but I can be content knowing that I don't sound a whole lot like anyone but me - and I like that sound - my sound.

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