Where the Performance Starts (and Stops)
As far back as I can remember, I wanted to be a performer. The tennis racket days as a little kid — was living in Rolling Stones world, singing to the imaginary arena.
I’ve always kind of suspected myself here. Did I want to be famous? Did I want to be a musician? Did I just want to perform? Sitting here now, I honestly don’t know.
A friend of mine passed along some advice he got from one of his old drummers. He said, “You gotta put on the cape.” And that’s pretty solid advice. You don’t want to go up there and just totally be yourself, because that’s not performing. But in the days of social media and everything else, you also don’t want to be super performative throughout your entire daily goings on. You have to strike a balance between you and performing, and that balance shifts and changes all the time.
One thing you really don’t want to do — and I see this a lot with local musicians — is perform off stage. Putting on your full gear to go get breakfast, being “the artist” at the grocery store. It's terrible and looks just exhausting. There’s a time and place for the stage. The real question is: where does the performance start, and where does it end?
And I think this is where age actually helps. I have such a straight day job, and I’m very artistic at night, and today the two barely meet.
That hasn’t always been true. There used to be blurred lines between day job and musician. What I’ve found is that the straighter my day job got, the more artsy-fartsy the music guy became at night — and I would postulate that the performances got better.
The music is getting better. And conversely, the day job work has gotten better too.