Cris Cohen: You posted a video clip called “A Buffet of Ballads.” At one point, as you're playing the concert, you're in the middle of “She's Everything” and it gets into this kind of instrumental expanse. What I thought was cool is with your right hand you went on this little faster pattern with the ride cymbal. And it was much faster than what you were playing on the rest of the kit, but it still fit the ballad. And I'm curious, because I don't think that was on the original recording, how often do you go into experiments like that? And is it spontaneous? Is it planned?
Ben Sesar, drummer for Brad Paisley: It depends on the circumstance. Something will evolve in a live show. Because remember, we play these songs over and over. One night I'm in a creative place (play something different) and I'll be like, “Okay, that was cool.” And then it will become the thing I do all the time. I'll allow that to happen. I don't fight that. And yes, it deviates from the record. Brad loves it when we're not like the record. The minute we start rehearsing a song, we know that it's not going to be like the record. And I like that. Because it gives it room to be spontaneous. Ift gives it that place where we can have fun with it live. So we're not just miming every night. We all want to play and be spontaneous… within the framework. We don't want to make the song unrecognizable. But it's not that hard to balance that. There's really no limit. You find your place where you can loosen up and deviate from the script and you take those opportunities… if you feel like it. Some nights, I don't feel like it. Some nights maybe I feel a little tired or I'm not feeling so connected. And then I don't take as many of those opportunities. It all depends how you feel. Other nights I'm alert, I'm ready to have a good time, and it's just flowing. I pay a lot of attention to how I feel before I play. I give a lot of weight to that. Because you can't force yourself to be in a great place, if you're in just a sort of average place. I try to honor that and not fight it by telling myself, “I have to be awesome tonight. My energy has to be great.” No, it doesn't, because I'm at a level where I can play with a lower internal energy and you still wouldn't know. The timing is going to be good. The feel is going to be good. There's a base level that I can always count on, even if I'm not feeling great. And then there's that extra, heightened or elevated state, which I pay attention to. And it's weird. I can have a great day, an awesome day -- beautiful weather, food’s perfect, plenty of sleep -- and then sit down to play and just feel blocked. I can't tell you why. So, what I try to do is just honor that and play. And then you never know. Sometimes in the middle of the show, because I'm not fighting it and telling myself I have to be awesome, then maybe I drift into feeling elevated. So I always pay attention to how I feel at the beginning and just play to that place. But I'm always happy to be there. There are no bad shows. Cris Cohen: With the live shows, you get an immediate reaction from people. But with your videos and your writing, there is a delay between when you release it and when you get a reaction from someone. Did that take some getting used to?
Stanton Moore of Galactic: When I first started writing articles and then wrote my first book, I was playing so many gigs that I didn't get that feedback right away. But once I started to get that feedback after years and years and years, you start to realize it's just a different type of connection. The instant connection playing gigs and having people moving in time to what you're doing, that's one thing. But even though the feedback and the reaction -- when people come to you about something that you demonstrated or explained or wrote -- even though that's a delayed reaction, it's also on a deeper level, because you know how much time they had to spend with it. Both of those types of feedback are cool. They're just different. Cris Cohen: Patty has a very distinct voice. What is the key to supporting her as a backing vocalist?
Dwight Baker of The Wind and The Wave: I got good at harmonies because someone had to do it and that person just became me. The key to harmonies is phrasing the same as the singer and hitting vowels sounds the same. If you're getting the vowel sounds and phrasing it the same, you can really disappear into a vocal, which is what I'm looking for on a harmony. So I have sung higher than I've ever sung in my life to support Patty often. And you know, I'm a giant man. I'm six foot four. I'm a big boy. And for some reason I can sing higher than a girl sometimes. So it just kind of naturally works with us the way we sing together. Our timbres seem to work well together. But I did have to learn to (match her pronunciation). Especially early on in her career, she is saying really weird vowels. And she does have a unique voice. So much so that, in the last seven years, I hear the newer bands (with female vocalists) and I'm like, “They were fans of Patty.” She's the most self-deprecating, humble person in the world. She would be like, “No one would ever copy my style.” But they do. People do. Cris Cohen: How come you go higher when you harmonize? Because you can be lower than the lead and harmonize. Dwight Baker: Yeah. Occasionally I do that. But the problem with our music is, where Patty likes to sit in the vocal, which is not -- except for a few songs -- very high for a girl. She's more in the mid-range for a girl and sometimes low. It just kind of bottoms out. It makes a song sound heavier than it needs to be. So it made sense to me to be above her more. Cris Cohen: And her different pronunciations, is she conscious of that or is it just what comes out? Dwight Baker: She wasn't (conscious of it) until I would say record three. She was like, “Have you listened to record one in a while, ‘From The Wreckage’? I said words really weird.” I was like, “Yeah, you do. You did.” And she's like, “I don't think I do that much anymore.” And then I started to notice and no, she doesn't. It has changed. And if you really listen to Robert Plant at the beginning and listen to Robert Plant now, great singers who can sing anything -- which Patty is one of those singers -- they just evolve. They just change the way they're approaching stuff. You don't know if they get bored or their voice just matures or changes, but they change. Chris Kimmerer, drummer for Thomas Rhett: Finding ways to sort of glue everyone together is really important. And it's so much easier when you've got guys who are actively listening to take care of their role in that equation. I'm always looking for ways to sort of glue my own body to what's happening rhythmically. Maybe that left foot splash that's going on the upbeats doesn't punch you in the face when you're sitting up front, but you kind of know it's there, you know? And maybe you know it's there because of how it tied into the guy doing the thing on the upbeats on the chorus of the guitar.
Cris Cohen: Now, one of the first things you notice when comparing Thelonious Monk's recordings to yours is the difference in the quality of sound, quite obviously because you had much different recording materials available to you than he did. Was there ever any concern about making the songs too clean or too crisp?
Andy Summers: Well, it's a good thought. Yeah, I understood what you were saying, but I guess the way I almost visualized it was that everything's just going to sound much clearer and fresh because of what we can bring to recordings now, the actual recording quality. No, I saw that as a plus actually. Cris Cohen: So it's like when you pick up an older vinyl album and you think, "If only he had the kind of recording equipment I have access to, how much better we could have heard him." Andy Summers: And also personally, I like recordings to be… I mean, this is always just something I have to go through with every engineer because engineers will tend to separate everything out and make them very clean, because that's what they do. And I always try and keep things a little rough, a little murky sounding, punchier. I don't like things to be too audiophile as it were, because I think it tends to take away from the richness of the music sometimes. |
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