Musical Heroes - a second take
by
, Feb-15-2015 at 12:45am (4301 Views)
A little over five years ago I wrote a blog trying to sort out my feelings in relation to my musical heroes. And at the time of course I figured I had written about all that needed to be said on the topic.
To prove me wrong, go here.
In the interim I have had a thought or two more, and kind of in a different direction. Bear with me, this is something.
I enjoy listening to Chris Thile much more when I ignore any connection between what he does on the mandolin and what I do on the mandolin. I do best if I pretend he plays some other instrument, only called the same as mine. (Similarly with Mike Marshall, Marty Stuart, Sierra Hull, and a bunch of others, I am just picking on Chris because he came to mind the first time I thought this through.)
These days I am inclined to think of it the way I think about NASCAR. I mean racing is done with cars, but what they do in their cars has little relationship with what I do in my car. Yea we sit the same way mostly, and grab the wheel the same way mostly, and ummm, we look through a windshield, and ummm… a few other similarities, but really, these similarities might as well be coincidental.
Both Chris and I use a pick. (For a while we used the same make and model of pick.) And he fingers with the left hand like I do. But that certainly does not make his playing necessarily relevant to my playing.
The analogy holds to surprising degree. For example if I attempt to do what Chris does, on my mandolin, what will happen will be the same as if I attempt to do what Matt Kenseth did at Daytona, in my car. Yea, I will crash and I will burn.
The analogy holds in other ways too. Certainly I can learn something, maybe a few things, about driving and driving skills, from close attention to NASCAR stars, but seriously, not a lot. I am better off learning how to drive from a drivers-ed instructor. And I can watch Sierra Hull, or Chris Thile, and pick up a few good tips here and there, but I would be much better off getting a good mandolin instructor, or watching the better quality teachers on line.
Here is the epiphany; while I drive every day, I have for years, and I have even taken a few defensive driving classes here and there, I have never, ever, had the slightest desire to drive like Dale Earnhardt Jr. I think what he and the NASCAR elite do is impressive, amazing even, but I have never wanted to race, or even to drive all that fast. I just want to get where I am going comfortably, safely, faster than walking, and with less exertion than cycling.
So too in mandolinning, I feel a whole lot better, about me, and about my heroes, if I remind myself that my goals do not involve them. I only want to play with others and have others want to play with me, and to intensely enjoy the music and the playing of it. I don’t want to play like them. Not really. What I want is to play like, well…. Like me. Only much, much better.