A couple of weeks ago, I was performing a song I’ve performed dozens of times, and I totally blanked the words in the middle of the first verse.
I laughed and announced I would start over. Then I blanked the words in the same place. After strumming a few chords, randomly trying to remember, I finally decided to play something else.
Sensing a bit of discomfort among the folks attending – a few frozen smiles, a couple of well-intended offers to Google the lyrics, etc. – I sought to put them at ease and shared one of many stories I could tell about big-time musicians messing up.
If you listen to live music, you’re going to hear mistakes, even on the world’s biggest stages. That’s just a fact. Lines and even entire verses get repeated or sung out of order, lyrics get replaced with gibberish, sour notes get played. And the show goes on.
The particular story I shared the night of this gig was about the singer-songwriter Jewel, and one of her concerts I saw on television years ago. She was on stage solo, without her band, playing one of her more famous tunes when she suddenly stopped. There was silence. Then Jewel told the crowd something like, “I forgot the words to my own song.” Her audience laughed.
I told the people in the venue I was playing: “I figure if Jewel can forget the words to a song she wrote, I can forget the words to a song someone else wrote.” The folks laughed. And the show went on.
This morning, I was thinking about that and remembered Jewel’s appearance a few years ago on the AXS television series, “The Big Interview With Dan Rather.” In the final segment, a video clip showed her playing the wrong chord on a song. The error had gone by unnoticed, but Jewel called attention to it as she continued to strum her guitar. What she told Rather about that moment was so cool, I wrote it down and kept it in my music diary.
“Letting mistakes happen,” she said. “Learning how to convert those mistakes into wins. … Let go of perfection. People don’t care about perfection. They care about an emotional experience. They don’t want you to be perfect. They want you to be real.”
I try to carry those sentiments with me all the time.
FWIW, the entire interview with Jewel is fascinating on multiple levels. The portion referenced here begins just past the 48-minute mark.
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