Finding the Verve Again

Today I spent several hours listening to recordings I hadn't really listened to in years.

I started with Woodkerne, a band I played with from the late 1990s into the 2000s. One recording led to another. Pastures of Plenty. The Old Copper Plate. Ireland’s Green Shore. Calliope House. The Musical Priest. I remembered arrangements I’d forgotten I remembered.

On Pastures of Plenty, when Paul sings “the water runs down,” I play a little descending scale on the violin. The water runs down and the fiddle runs down with it. I’d forgotten about that.

On The Musical Priest, Paul does something harmonically that puzzled me for years. Instead of resolving where I expected him to, he goes to the IV chord. I didn’t figure out what he was doing until years later when I played the guitar part myself. All I knew at the time was that whatever he was doing made it incredibly fun to play fiddle over.

That’s music.

Then I went further back.

I listened to Maple Ridge, the bluegrass band I played with from 1989 to 2001. Then Swift River, an originals band where I mostly played mandolin. John Rough was playing banjo with me in all these different settings, and we carried that bluegrass habit of trading the melody back and forth into Woodkerne. Somebody takes the tune. Somebody else moves underneath. Then somebody comes roaring back in.

Later Jim Bunting joined Woodkerne. We’d met him at an Irish session at the Harp. Jim didn’t come from bluegrass and didn’t particularly like our everybody-takes-a-turn arrangements. He wanted to play more like an Irish session, with everybody inside the tune together.

So the band changed.

It was still fun. It was just different.

Jim and I eventually formed Celticado and played wedding ceremonies together, mostly just the two of us. I listened to some of those recordings today too.

Then I found recordings I’d made with a New York singer-songwriter named Brendan O’Donnell. Brendan didn’t write conventional music charts. He drew things. Pictograms. I had to figure out what he wanted and draw my own pictograms to correspond with his. We had a whiteboard in my studio covered with the things.

He wanted my electric violin to function essentially as the lead guitar.

It was weird.

It was also great fun.

And somewhere in the middle of listening to all of this, I realized what I’ve been missing.

Verve

Over the years the internet changed.

When I first started using it, I wasn’t trying to establish a personal brand or build an audience or become an influencer. I was trying to get gigs for my bands and find students.

The music already existed. The internet was just a way of telling people about it.

Somewhere along the way that got reversed.

I’ve accumulated Facebook groups, Reddit communities, profiles, blogs, accounts and assorted little pieces of myself scattered all over the internet. There’s always another page that could use a post, another profile that could be improved, another audience that could theoretically be built.

I’ve gotten pretty good at it.

But none of it is music.

Today I finally understood why so much of it has felt hollow.

There was no core.

No verve.

What I loved about those old bands wasn’t simply performing. It wasn’t even necessarily the songs or tunes.

It was what happened between musicians.

Paul plays a chord I don’t expect and suddenly I hear somewhere new to take the fiddle.

John starts a tune I don’t know, so I stay out. Eventually he reaches a tune I do know and the fiddle comes flying in. Not knowing the first tune accidentally becomes the arrangement.

Jim approaches Irish music completely differently from John and me, so we have to find a musical language that works for all of us.

Brendan draws some incomprehensible shape on a whiteboard and somehow I have to turn it into electric violin.

Somebody does something.

I respond.

They respond to what I did.

And suddenly there’s something in the room that didn’t exist thirty seconds earlier.

That’s what I’ve been missing.

Not another Facebook group.

Not another subreddit.

Not another profile.

Another musician.

Someone who makes me hear something I wouldn’t have heard by myself.

Today I found myself thinking how much fun it would be to go to California and play music with an old musical friend.

Then another thought occurred to me.

The Adam I remember from all these recordings wouldn’t sit around wondering whether that was practical.

He’d figure out a way to do it.

So that’s Verve Music.

I don’t know exactly what it’s going to become, and for once I don’t particularly want to decide in advance.

I just want to find the music again.

And find somebody to play it with.