The gig was amazing. Thank you. More coming up! See below.
- Trevor
Good morning. I don't mind staying in the personal realm here. The story of music is too big, anybody's own story is always too big and you can only ever try to convey a small slice of it. I can just try to convey the relevant angle, stay on topic. Point is, there is music to be made.
I haven't done much surfing, and I don't consider myself a surfer. But from what I do know about surfing, the experience I have with it (again, not much. Barely any really) I don't see or imagine too many surfers spending time discussing each others' surfing. Pointing out little things to each other and stuff, what someone did "well" and what could go "better" and how to make it look better, etc. I mean, maybe they do? But it's not the point because there's the ocean to consider, a much vaster consideration. Much more compelling. The ocean is what matters. In my mind I see surfers considering the ocean to each other and struggling to find words.
(Keanu Reeves voice:) The Ocean. It's big. We are too small to matter to it, but we go face it. We go into it. It kicks our ass and we keep coming back. We can't help ourselves. It forces us to overcome our weakness. To grow. To surrender. To meet it.
We, I... simply do not matter in the face of it.
The musicians who I relate to best speak of music like that. It's the ocean, it's the universe. We don't talk about "our" music. We don't talk about style, technique or form much at all. We'll check in with each other, like "how is it going?" How is your process going. How are you surviving? As the ocean of music imposes itself in on you, day after day, minute by minute... how are you holding up and have you learned anything useful or interesting to pass on to me, about how I might hold up better as the universe imposes itself on me, day after day?
We are all in it, and that is the point. It is the Ocean, we are unimaginably small as we navigate it.
So did you get out there?
Did you connect?
Did you fail catastrophically and have to start again from scratch, getting pushed back and under and back out again as you found a way back in?
Or did you just eat s**t.
"So-and-so is kicking a lot of ass right now".
???
(Define ass, define kick.)
These are my experiences. I love that these are my experiences, because I don't define myself by my successes or failures. I define myself by my love of doing it and by my dedication to that love. My immersion in it. It helps me understand the world and it helps me connect in the most meaningful way to other humans. I am not myself without it.
Music is what we are here for, it's what we come from and what we'll return to. For now, we play.
We’re gonna check in with Ed Marshall now. Call-in style. Click play above to hear it.
For those of you who don’t know Ed, here’s the episode we did together a couple of years ago:
“How did the gig go, Trev?”
More like How did it feel.
I played my first proper show of "my own material" the other day, the first one in almost a decade. My family was there, my hometown came out. Friends I had not seen in 30 years, godparents...
"How did it go?" Let's see. People were there and listened, people could watch it on facebook. How do You think it went? Does it matter? I have no idea how it went, I only know how I felt beforehand, getting ready for it. How I felt while it was happening and how I felt afterward. How I feel now.
That's all I know, and I barely know that. I don't have words to describe the feeling. Words would diminish my joy and gratitude, even if they were accurate and precise, insightful ones. And I'm enveloped in joy and gratitude in a way that I cannot describe. So that's all I can say.
Only one of my musician friends asked me "How did the show feel?" Bret Mosley. He just put out his new record, it took him almost a decade to make it. He's been through the fire, too. So he named his record that. ←Go give it a listen.
Thank god for my musician friends, the ones who live it. The ones who learned to surrender and who know that it's not about them, not about us, not about the material or the ideas. People will hear what we do and they will have their experience, meanwhile we got to be together in the presence of the ocean. That's all that matters.
I got to get back in the Ocean, and woah. It's not just that I missed the feeling and that my spirit finally got to inhabit my body again. It's that I got to percieve just how much I'd changed since the last phase, how much I've been able to let go, so that now I can really be in it more. More than before. Hearing and feeling it more than before. I still don't have words.
But nothing will make you appreciate a thing more than the absence of that thing. I was walking through the desert and I arrived at the table, set with a pitcher of water and a glass.
I sat, I poured one and I drank.
Something like that.
Welcome to the family.
Here are the next band shows coming up, come out:
John Kimock and I are playing together for three dates in early October:
Bloomsburg PA on October 6
Bethlehem PA on October 7
New York City on October 8
More dates on the website, including some solo performances. It’s all very special right now.
As always, big love to your ears. Thanks for tuning in here, we’ll talk more next week.
Trevor
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