Today’s musicians have easy access to home studios filled with fun and fascinating tools, as well as the on-demand dopamine hit of social media performance. It’s understandable that one might get wrapped up in all that cool stuff and stop going on stage in front of actual people.
Call it gigging, playing out, doing shows — whatever you call it, I haven’t been doing much of it lately. I haven’t performed my own music in ages, and when I have played out, it’s been on saxophone, in other people’s bands. Meanwhile I’ve been over here learning, practicing, writing… and thanks to the wonders of the Internet, I’ve been connecting and sharing music with more people than ever! But I haven’t been working up a set, packing up my gear and getting in front of actual people. As a result, some important musical muscles have gotten woefully out of shape.
Fortunately, Triple Click’s upcoming show has given me a reason to get myself in gear. (It’s this coming Friday at the Alberta Rose and there are still tickets!) Triple Click is a video game podcast, but all three hosts are musicians, and we like to add music to our live shows when possible. I’ll be able to bring over a bunch of instruments from my studio down the road, so in addition to talking about Donkey Kong and Outer Wilds, I’ll be looping guitar stuff, playing saxophone… we’ll have a keyboard for Maddy… I even wrote a new song to kick the night off.
When July was still a few months away, the show took on a pleasantly abstract quality whenever I thought about it. Cool, I thought, we’re gonna do a show. I had the broad strokes outlined in my mind, and the particulars would come. We had so much time.
Then I closed my eyes for five minutes and the show was less than a month away. Whoops! It was time to get down to it, to figure out what was actually going to have to happen in this show I’d been daydreaming about.
For example: the songs. In addition to the new intro song, we’ll be performing one of my co-host Maddy Myers’ originals, as well as a cover. The process of taking any of those songs from “mostly done” to “ready for performance” is awfully ruthless, at least for me. I sit down and try to play through it and find myself immediately frustrated. This part doesn’t work right; this part is too difficult to sing. This key doesn’t work on guitar. I don’t know how to make this transition work. I’m supposed to play a solo here but it sounds weird. So I start cutting, then grabbing what’s left and wresting it into shape. The idea of the song meets the sledgehammer of practical implementation. It’s violent stuff, at least creatively speaking, but in the end I’m left with an actual song. One I can sing and play from start to finish!
I’ve undergone the same process with my instruments and equipment. I’ve been using a Line 6 Helix in the studio for a couple of years but this will be my first time using it on stage. (My stinky amp will be there too, of course.) It’s easy enough to use a Helix like a regular guitar pedalboard, pressing each “stompbox” button to turn a given effect on or off. But as I got down to brass tacks, I realized I had way too many things plugged in, and way too many options available. I didn’t need every effect and sound known to man; I needed three or four tones, and I needed to be able to quickly switch between them. I didn’t need a huge multi-channel looper; I needed a simple looper I could fade out with a volume pedal.
I knew I could get the Helix to do those things, but I hadn’t taken the time to learn how, because I hadn’t needed to. Its software is kind of a kludgy mess, and you can get perfectly good sounds out of it without getting into command center customization or snapshot management. Now, with a clear goal in mind, I sat down and spent a few hours learning how to actually get the thing to do the specific tasks I needed it to do. It was surprisingly rewarding.
I’ve undergone a similar process of editing and trimming with every other element of the show:
My voice has gotten pretty out of shape over the past year, and even the relatively simple songs I’m singing at this show have required a vocal wake-up regimen
Maddy will be playing my keyboard, which has a whole series of live performance features I’d never investigated. I sure know how they work now!
My guitar strings are ancient and the neck pickup volume pot has been cutting out; the latter thing is not a big deal in the studio but definitely a big deal on stage
An iPad is a powerful musical tool, but it can do basically anything. It’s been helpful to have just a few simple things I needed it to do, and to figure out how to make it do them
Do I have any cool shirts? I do not. Still working on that one (Update: Emily found me a couple good options)
These past couple weeks have been defined by an increasingly keen focus, and a sense of narrowing. Narrowing in on what I actually need; narrowing the scope of the show and my role in it. Narrowing down what I needed to focus on any given day. It’s been stressful, but not unpleasant. All that narrowing has been refreshing, similar to the feeling I get when I delete an unnecessary paragraph from a piece of writing. Good riddance. Look how much less there is now!
I’ve long loved the idea of the “Musician’s Tripod”, first articulated to me decades ago by my friend Daniel Fabricant. The Musician’s Tripod has three legs: learning, teaching, and performing. You should always be challenging yourself to learn something new; always be refining your own expertise by teaching; and always be taking what you know and actually doing the thing. Neglect any one of the three legs, and you’ll get out of balance.
I tend to neglect the performance leg more than the other two, and it feels good to right the balance even just a small amount. And while performance itself is great, just getting ready for this show has been stressful, bracing, and energizing. I feel more musically focused than I’ve been in a long time. Man, I need to perform more.
Every Lyric Matters
The newest episode of Strong Songs is the second mailbag of Season Seven. We’ve got questions on topics ranging from bluegrass to Blue Prince to the blues. Also, we get a very special guest answer for a question about lyrics. Make that guests, actually.
About those guests: I've been recording interviews to run during the time in between seasons, and realized it would be smart to ask folks to help answer a listener question while I've got them. Then I can include their answer on a mailbag episode, as a fun way to tease a future interview. So, consider this episode a proof of concept, and look forward to a much longer episode with The Wailin’ Jennys over the summer.
Season Seven Finale will be out next Friday, and it’s a good one imo. If you want to listen to it right now, go join the Patreon! I’ll have a bunch of good new stuff in the feed in between seasons, and as always, patrons get episodes two weeks early. Thanks for listening, everyone.
Onward
That’ll do it for now; I’ve got a show to prepare for, and these lyrics aren’t going to memorize themselves. As usual, you can find me on Instagram and Bluesky, posting infrequently but posting nonetheless. It’s a mess out there. I hope you’re all taking care.
I’ll leave you with this pic of Appa, who sometimes gets sad and goes to sleep under the shoe rack. There’s a lesson in there somewhere, I’m sure of it.
Take care and keep listening -
~KH
7/5/2025