This song is about a coal miner whose wife is leaving him.
The last 6 weeks have been pretty weird. I learned a few different
songs, but when it came time to record after learning all the hard parts
- I'd lose all motivation to capture or share it. I'd wonder who even
cares about this song nowadays? Why am I even learning it other than I
like it? I love learning Bach, but that answer is far more clear -
absolutely no body cares about Bach today. This is why I don't want to
be a classical musician because hardly anybody cares about it. Some
say, "but if you like it then shouldn't that be your focus?" I guess..
but is that really the point? To just play for yourself? Or even worse
- be satisfied serving as background music?
I'm only one person, and voice / guitar are great complements, so it
makes sense to fill space with these 2 contrasting instruments - but
candidly I lose interest. I think its because it doesn't maximize
enough possibilities? There are great players who add a "3rd voice" by
throwing out guitar fills or vocal ornaments between the rhythm /
bass and the melody / lyrics - but this takes a tremendous amount of
time to develop this kind of vocabulary and then deliver them at will. I
like old songs and authentic players who put the time into their chops,
but recording technology is pretty amazing today considering when I was
in college just 10 years ago it was an enormous pain in the ass to
record my consumer level laptop, so why not leverage cameras and
microphones to get all 4 voices?. I've done it before so why not? And
then suddenly I think I realized my dissertation topic for this
"graduate degree" in music I started 2 years ago.
Like a string quartet with the cello serving as the bass / root of
harmony, the first violin generally always given the melody, 2nd violin
providing counter-melodies and harmonizing at times, and viola filling
out the harmony and sometimes countering as well. This is more
interesting to me. I am interested of course in improving my voice
quality, intonation, guitar vocabulary, and live performance ability,
but honestly my number one interest has always been how my favorites
would manage textures, create melodies, and being mindful of doing more
with less - I think this is called musicianship. We'll see if I can put
out an A+ paper by the end.
I thought I decided I was done with making videos and should just make
audio, but in the end its a good way to show other musicians and get
them to want to play with me.