The Songwriter Wants You Not To Worry
The flip side of the coin, I know, Are you scared yet
The music business is wonderful and you will live forever.
Wait.
MUSIC is wonderful and it lives forever.
This essay is the story of one night in Nashville, TN that might refute nearly everything I wrote about in my Substack essay published on January 24th, 2024.
The Songwriter Writes About Death (and Life)
Note to my readers- I started writing this essay in early June, 2023. Life made itself more interesting and challenging than usual and I drifted away for quite a while. Since I wrote the first line, at least another dozen reasonably successful musicians in their 60’s or younger have died.
And now, for something completely different….
January 26th, 2024- Girl Dinner!
The place is sold out and packed to the rafters.
I’m sitting on the balcony with my crush and all of the other people over 40: mostly parents, cousins, and people with some connection to a member in one of the bands playing “Girl Dinner” at the East Room in Nashville.
Some people have flown in just for this show.
Most of us are up there because that’s where the chairs can be found.
If you’re over 40 and haven’t been to an actual LOUD show lately, people now stand for nearly every show. Clubs no longer appear to provide chairs, which is too bad, because in addition to providing people with a place to sit, they can be wielded effectively, as whole chairs or after being broken up into hefty pieces of wood, during a bar fight.
I think it’s a plot to keep old people away.
The headlining band is Mary and the Matrix (The band that includes The Kid (Tess Pope)) joined by three other acts for an evening they’ve called “Girl Dinner.”
I’ve seen Mary and The Matrix play four songs during one of those Nashville shows where a bunch of bands share an evening, nobody gets paid, and whatever set dynamics you have planned are likely to get eaten up by using unfamiliar equipment and getting a 35 second sound check.
Even with the odds stacked against them, they turned those four songs into a mini-riot that included serious stage chemistry ala Bowie’s Spiders from Mars.
So I was pretty interested in seeing a full set.
The room is filled up with kids dressed as dangerously as they can imagine, which is a bit of Bowie meets Gaga meets Olivia Rodrigo meets Billy Eilish. That’s just the girls. The boys are dressed like 98% of all boys these days, which means 1974 casual. The real fashion mavens among the men wear band shirts from long retired 70’s and 80’s bands.
That’s actually pretty cool because the bands all share a connection to that era when people PLAYED music that was guitar heavy and filled with riffs and runs. There isn’t a computer in sight.
The stage is filled with amplifiers. The show hasn’t started and the smoke machine is already on.
A touch of adrenaline kicks up in me, leftover from my 20’s when the mere thought of an empty stage engendered in me a combination of ridiculous joy and utter terror.
I’m actually a little jittery.
“When my boots hit the boards, I'm a brand new man
With my back to the riser, I make my stand”
-Steve Earle
The inherent misogyny of nearly every road song like this notwithstanding, Steve Earle got the grandiose feeling of being a performer right with “Guitar Town.”
My favorite moment of every show, to this day, is the moment of walking out into the lights: In the seconds before I take that step I’m a normal citizen, and then…I’m not. It’s the closest thing these days to being an actual superhero.
I don’t know what to expect from the other acts. They don’t dissapoint.
Venus and the Flytraps is two women who share some bitterly funny takes on living with humans. There’s a cabaret aspect to what they do. I was distracted by the fact that they shared one capo during their set, making me wonder if they needed a capo GoFundme, but it was still pretty cool to see lyrics taken seriously.
Sofia Perez and her very tight and kicking band amped everything up and I got that feeling I always get when somebody just casually fronts a really good rock band. It’s a hell of a lot harder to do well than Sofia makes it look.
Iphone videos don’t do her justice, but this is still worth a watch.
Sofia Perez- Live at the East Room
And then it’s the band I’m there for and Mary and The Matrix hit hard, as expected. And this time, with their own gear and a chance to do an actual sound check, the sound keeps up with the energy and the vibe. The original songs are downright nasty, using that term in the best manner possible, and Mary has a distinctive alto that does not sound like any other singer. One of the few covers they do is a Lady Gaga cover and Mary’s voice is similar to Gaga but is more personal and filled with a dark sense of humor. She is compelling without it seeming like she’s trying too hard.
It’s a voice that can lead a band somewhere.
By the end of the second song, The Kid, who a mere two years ago insisted that I close the Doghouse door during lessons so nobody would accidentally hear her, is on the edge of the stage pulling off that MTV video move of playing directly into the camera while making classic and necessary guitar-solo faces. Later in the evening she’ll repeat the move while the audience makes “we are not worthy” bows in her direction.
The Bass player, Courtney Dymon, is inches away from crowd surfing yet never misses a lick.
I was never that cool on stage.
That’s why I’m in the balcony where old people go to sit down.
After Mary and The Matrix finish, my crush and I are discussing whether or not we’ve reached the over-60-point-of-no-return and should head back to the hotel when 18 year old Ailani Pedroza ( a last minute substitute replacing a band that had dropped out) and the pick-up band of friends she’s put together take the stage.
Thirty seconds and a couple of chords later Ailani opens her mouth to sing and my crush and I sit right back down.
I’m a rough singer, tending to make up in phrasing and expressiveness what is missing from the instrument. So I’m acutely aware of what it sounds like to have a VOICE.
Note- Singing loudly in an overwrought manner while hitting notes that scare dogs (see-The Voice) isn’t having a VOICE.
A VOICE is Aretha Franklin, Marvin Gaye, Marian Anderson, Otis Redding, Elton John, Anita O’day, Dolly Parton, and Linda Rondstadt, to name a few.
A VOICE doesn’t need to be pushed to the edge to sound passionate. A VOICE doesn’t need to be ever and always fancier to be sophisticated. Whitney Houston didn’t have a VOICE when she sang “I Will Always Love You.” Dolly did.
And there’s now a VOICE coming off of the East Room stage. The kids on stage are all friends, friends who like and admire each other, so I don’t know if they actually know what their friend is doing.
But I sure as hell do.
It’s a young voice, but only compared to what she will sound like after a few more years of developing this ridiculously big, incredibly melodic and sweet instrument.
She has that thing that comes along once in a very rare while. Every note she sings matters.
The whole room, exhausted just a few minutes ago, wakes up.
She sings ballads, jazz-tinged conversational songs, and songs that hit hard and loud. And never for a second does she ever lose that little bit of extra air that makes the difference between a great voice and a voice that is the VOICE.
She’s eighteen.
Ridiculous.
Her parents, sitting next to me, were enthralled and utterly moved by their daughter’s talent, as any parent should be. And so on-board with her musical future that they had flown in the night before to see the show and were leaving the next morning.
My father and mother once surprised me at an in-the-round show at the Bluebird in Nashville, taking up positions at a stage-side table while wearing Grouch Marx noses and glasses.
Once again, I know.
I don’t know what’s going to happen for Ailani Pedroza or Mary and the Matrix. The Music Business has a knack for not getting it when the machine finds something it loves.
But it won’t matter.
None of them know what an old musician knows: that what they did on an unremarkable Friday night in a little club in a town with a musician on every corner, playing an absolutely perfect show that left everybody in the room enthralled through the very last note is the very definition of being ALIVE and money and fame are poor substitutes for doing THAT.
Most people will never know what it feels like, the perfect set, the perfect song, the perfect moment.
I know.
It happened for me at the Patronaat in Haarlem, Netherlands. And at the Sheep Shed in Friesland. And it happens nearly every show in Glasgow and Utrecht.
And knowing that it might happen again is what puts me on airplanes for 10 hour flights, at an age when each trip gets a little more difficult.
And seeing it happen for young musicians is every bit as thrilling.
Now they know.
I love to see a great show. Love to see a band that knows how to be a band, even if it’s just for a moment.
It’s what actual optimism looks like. It’s what love feels and passion looks like. It delivers all the promise of a moment in time, and can be truly unforgettable.
A band out in the world is a fragile being, blown about by winds that lift them and storms that impede their progress.
Things will have changed since then for every musician I saw that evening at the East Room. That’s the other part of playing music. As soon as the show ends, everything starts over.
I already know that for one of these bands there has been a gig that suddenly wasn’t a gig, with a promoter who wasn’t really a promoter, a gig where what the band really needed was a manager who was as good at throwing punches as negotiating fees and merch percentages.
Other things, more personal, more painful than a bad night in the business, will happen.
But, them’s the breaks, kid.
A night like that Friday night happens only once in a while. It’s a blessing and a curse. They will be chasing the feeling of that moment for the rest of their lives. I know. There will be nights equally as high powered and musically satisfying. But those won’t ever be the first time that the THING THAT MAKES MUSIC PERFECT happened.
The night couldn’t have been better. My father’s adage that music always wins proved to be true again.
And, of course, we all went home with Covid.
Love somebody,
N
April 10, 2024
Santa Cruz, California
PS- It’s taking me longer to write these, lately, which is the exact opposite of what I should be doing to be a “success” on Substack. But, what the hell, I never seem to know how to do this. I’m sitting in a hotel room after day two of making another record with NeedtoKnow Music. I’m starting to work on my set for my next tour that starts in May.
Old fighters don’t stop until they mumble and shuffle, old home run hitters become designated hitters, and old singers can’t step off the stage as long as there’s the possibility of one perfect night, like the night of January 26th at the East Room in Nashville, Tennessee.
We know.
Beautifully expressed - wish I’d been there!
Well, at least I’ve caught a few of your perfect gigs in Glasgow and look forward to more. Keep loving!
I love reading these. Keep going, Nathan!