If you see me on FB, you might wonder why I’ve been posting about playing outdoors in random places here in France. There are some practical reasons and more spiritual ones.
No I’m not busking. For one thing, I simply need to practice to keep and build my musical fitness. It goes away, fam, especially as you get older. I know that’s stating the obvious but I’ve never been a diligent practicer. Yes, I’ve played music for literally decades. But that was for bands, where you can hide, and I had lost my chops entirely for several years at one point when I basically gave up music. Solo is a totally different beast, it’s like I started over about nine years ago now.
Playing outside is daunting but I like it. Since for a while now I haven’t been in one place long enough to line up actual gigs, it’s sort of like the open mics I was doing around DC recently to stay in shape. It’s a big step up from practicing in your bedroom, because with any eyes and ears on you it adds that little bit of pressure that is helpful. You’ve got to bear down more. It’s like practice for your nerves as well, which I still have a slight problem with. I’m a growth-mindset type, it’s an ongoing process to get to where I want to be.
There’s something profound about placing your music out in the world, instead of in a closed-off venue. And doing it in a place like Paris becomes part of my explorations, sort of like with photography. I’m sniffing around for the right spot, the right time of day, the right situation, where I feel a certain comfort and connection with the surroundings. It’s a vibe thing, for me the camera is like a divining rod and so is this. Sometimes I pick for acoustics, underpasses are always good.
It’s led to memorable moments in the last couple days.
On Friday I played in a little park right behind Sacre-Coeur. People nearby here and there, of all ages, reading books (yep, there’s hope for the world) or quietly sitting around. Very peaceful on a perfect day weather-wise. I played for maybe an hour on one of the covered concrete benches, trying to add to rather than detract from the mood.
At least no one fled. One young guy was sitting on a bench across from me with his eyes closed for a good while, almost like he was meditating. He came up to me after, I said I hoped I wasn’t disturbing him.
“No, just the opposite” he said. “Are those your songs??”
Turns out he was a musician and had been digging it. He had kind, thoughtful, and insightful things to say about the melodies, chords, passion, etc but also just about creativity and life. Just an awesome guy, we talked for a good half hour. Made the whole day of lugging my guitar up and down the hills of Montmartre in the heat worth it. Classic case of ‘if you reach even one person’.
Then it happened again the next day.
Not at first. I went back to Montmartre but this time that same park didn’t work at all. It was just too hectic, even annoying.
When it started getting late I settled on a shaded little pocket park down the street. Kind of noisy, near a main road. It was partly a playground on one end, there were little kids charging around. I got sprayed by a water gun and one kid in diapers kept trying to smack my guitar.
Not ideal but I hung in there, shifting to my new alter-ego set - a revived compilation of originals written by me and/or certain friends spanning various bands we were in back in the long-ago DC scene (a slice of which I wrote about here). Plus a couple of covers. That material worked better - louder and more upbeat than my usual solo stuff which is fairly mellow.
Toward the end a couple of young French rock-and-roll types had stopped to watch as I bashed out a version of Smithers-Jones, a song my old band Modest Proposal used to cover. They seemed to like it.
“Super cool. Pink Floyd?” one asked.
“The Jam,” I answered. Blank stares. Oh well.
I had noticed a young art-nerdy girl sitting on the other side of the park was sketching me for a while. I went over to see if she would show me. She was super nice, she actually gave it to me, said “you play really well!”, and vanished.
Oh man, I’ll cherish this. All my tiredness and doubts fell away for the second straight day, once again all it took was that one person, one sweet interaction, to make it feel special. And this time suddenly the roles were flipped, I was the part of the visual landscape someone else chose to focus on. Pretty cool.
While I’m not taking photos much at the moment, this process and the little rewards that come from it feel similar.
[By now you might be thinking: um, video please? Maybe I will eventually in some form, but frankly I hate crappy little phone videos - of myself and others - and I don’t really have any gear whatsoever here to make it sound decent. Then the whole enterprise becomes something else, that will never do justice to the experience and the moment.]
Speaking of taking music out into the world, this is super cool, take a look. No, he’s not my beard-game inspo but I do love Loney Dear’s work. He’s like Sweden’s modern-day Brian Wilson.