Musical Intimacy

What is shared between performer an audience?

Immediately after my last post, in which I talked about Caetano Veloso’s mixture of expressiveness and privacy as a performer, I read Howard Salmon’s thoughtful post about different ways that intimacy is expressed in music, and I realized that it’s a useful term and that I would reach for different examples than Salmon.

Having grown up around folk music, I think about the relationship between the performer and both the music and the audience. People often use the term “authenticity” to convey a positive judgement about folk music but, in many cases, “intimacy” might be a more useful word to describe a performer who reflects something genuine in their performance. I can offer a few examples (some of which will be familiar to long-time readers of the blog) and, of course, it’s inevitably a subjective judgement.

First I would mention that there are two ways that a song might covey something about intimacy, either the content — that as a work of art it reflects something about the human experience — or the performance itself. For example Salmon mentions Joni Mitchell’s album Blue, and “Carey” is a clear example of a song in which there’s one relationship described (between Mitchell and Carey Raditz) and one expressed (between Mitchell and the listener). I will touch on both of those but am more focused on the performance, while I think Salmon’s comments lean slightly towards the content of the song.

This is in no way exhaustive, but here are some of the ways that I would think about intimacy in music.

Music as part of the fabric of life

I remember a conversation, years ago, with someone talking about Indian restaurants gave Americas a distorted sense of Indian cooking, because many of the staple dishes were, essentially, versions of food which were created for the rich, and that were fairly different from what people would cook at home. There’s been a shift over time, I see Chana Masala on menus more frequently now than I did then, but the comment still speaks to the difference between performance and the personal or home experience.

Similarly, knowing many people for whom folk music is a part of their lives, there’s a particular intimacy to recording which feel like the reflect that person’s relationship with music in their own life. For example, here’s Townes Van Zandt¹ from the Heartworn Highways documentary. He’s aware of the camera; it is a performance, but it feels, also true to them just sitting around and playing music.

Or, another example, which sounds a little more dated but captures a similar mood.

This recording was made one spring night in 1956 in Bristol, Virginia. After a long day of radio shows, barn dances, hog auctions and the like, Carter, Ralph, Curly Lambert, Ralph Mayo and I went to WCYB studios around midnight where I set up a mike, asked the Stanley’s to sing some of the old traditional songs and turned on the tape recorder. The result is what you hear. It was all done in one take without rehearsal or planning.

…

They were, in personality and temperament, seemingly quite different from each other. Carter was engaging, outgoing, and conversational. Ralph, while friendly, was reserved, deferential and rarely said much. I probably have never seen two men as close to one another as were the Stanley Brothers. — Larry Ehrlich (liner notes An Evening Long Ago)

This is the same form of intimacy that Tim Erikson speaks of in this recording². It doesn’t promise to reveal his inner thoughts or emotions, but to speak as honestly as he can of his relationship to the music.

One voice alone may be the most common form of music in the world, though at the moment many people encounter it only in the lullaby or in the shower. So, for the time being, this recording represents both a radical idea and a lost art overdue for a comeback. Soul of the January Hills was about one hour and many years in the making - about an hour to sit down and sing 14 songs in a row as they came to me and many years of working to the point where I could do that well enough to want to share it beyond my immediate family. It's meant for listening, but you could also learn a couple of the songs and sing them yourself. As long as it doesn't bother the neighbors too much it might be a good thing

Trust & Collaboration

“I am not good with one-on-one relationships, I’m good with one-on-two thousand relationships.” — Joan Baez

To wrestle with a more complicated sort of intimacy, there is a question of how much a performer is sincerely expressing some part of their own emotional life in their performance.

Music, like any art, exists in the interaction between a performer and a listener. The listener is actively involved in making sense of the music and bringing their own emotional perspective on the music. There is a positive element of willful suspension of disbelief³ — of taking a song on it’s own terms, and accepting it as a something which describes a world which likely is similar to the broader world but may contain elements of fantasy or exaggeration. Similarly there’s a question of whether we consider the performer a trustworthy guide to the emotional world of the song. One of the most basic ways in which that trust is the sense that they are presenting their own experience⁴. For example, I think this performance of “Boxcars” by Butch Hancock is extremely good, and one part of that is that I believe when he’s making the harmonica sound like a train whistle and the guitar sound like a train that he is communicating something about how he hears trains. If I found out later that he just liked that sound and came up with the story as an excuse to play that, I would be disappointed. I might come back around to appreciating it in a different way, but it would change my relationship to the song.

Or, another example, I was listening to the Ferron song, “Misty Mountain” which feels like a song that comes out of struggle. I never listened to it and wondered what experience produced that song but I wasn’t surprised to see an interview which notes

Ferron calls “Misty Mountain”, released in 1978 and one of her fan favourites, her cry in the dark. She was 22 and depressed, holed up in a room in the basement of a friend, novelist Keith Maillard. She felt safe.

“I think I was suffering PTSD but I only knew that many years later,” Ferron remembers. “It just seemed like I was kind of nervous and nutty. I don’t think they really saw me much for about three weeks. I just slept and didn’t give a shit really. Then Keith came down and he said, ‘You gotta get up, you’ve got to care.’ The only thing I cared about right then is would he please get the f--k out of my room.”

He left, but it stirred her enough that Ferron got up and took her guitar into the windowless, mirrorless cedar bathroom. She strummed in total darkness, her preference for playing guitar — “You use your ears to know where you are, you can’t trust anything else” — and she wrote the song.

“I just started singing it and it was, I suppose, a prayer,” Ferron says.

Even without knowing the story, it’s always been a song that I trust. On some level it’s hard to say why that matters. It could be the case that if I feel the song has meaning to me, that can be true regardless of what it meant to Ferron. But it does make a difference.

I’ve previously written about Rosalie Sorrels recording of the Utah Phillips song, “Don’t Go Home” which I think of as a wonderful gift by a performer to a songwriter. It’s not her song originally but she grounds it in a way that, again, makes me as a listener willing to freely extend trust, which is another form of intimacy.

There are other people that I don’t have that feeling of trust for. I think Amy Winehouse, for example, is an amazing singer, but I’ve never liked her as much as most people because I don’t trust her as a guide into those emotions, but that’s a purely subjective reaction.

The Value Of Distance

Thinking about intimacy helps me understand why I appreciate the style of Caetano Veloso, mentioned at the top, or performers like Bowie, Sinatra, Prince, or Rihanna for whom I feel a sense of distance between them as a person and their performances — a sense of playing a role.

In some ways that removes the question of trust. I am not concerned with whether the performance is grounded in them as a person, but in what their performance brings to the song. As an example and closing here is wonderful performance of “I Can’t Help Falling In Love With You” by Arlo Gutherie⁵. He opens by talking about having played the song at a folk festival with Pete Seeger.

Everything was fine until Pete looked at me and said, ‘“Arlo, why don’t sing something?” I realized that Pete had just sung all of the songs that I thought anybody might know. I didn’t know what to do. I said, “Well here’s one you might know, made possible by the king of folk singers Elvis Presley.” Pete looked at me; he seems like a nice guy most of the time, he had a look in his eye that said that banjo could get fairly dangerous any moment. He’d been singing them peace and love songs for decades but folksingers would argue themselves to death over what a folksong was. . . .

It’s a great story, it sets up the song well; his performance (with Pete Seeger present) is a great pay-off. I believe the story is true, and it doesn’t matter at all. The while thing is a masterful performance which elevates the song in a way that doesn’t depend on anything about Arlo Guthrie. Music doesn’t have to feel intimate to be moving or awe-inspiring. There is something wonderful about performers who are comfortable expressing an intimate connection in their music, and there can also be something wonderful about performers who can use the stage and their music to create something beautiful and separate from themselves.

1. I’ve written before about Townes’ remarkable ability to inhabit a song.

2. Which I have shared before.

3. When looking up the reference I found that Modest Mouse has a song titled “Willful Suspension of Disbelief” and yet, there’s no “in popular culture” section in the wikipedia entry.

4. There’s a very effective scene in the David Mamet movie House Of Games, in which Joe Mantegna explains that the phrase “confidence game” comes from the fact that the con will will build trust by appearing to extend confidence; trusting the mark with something valuable. The dynamic in performance is different but it is still true that a performer gain trust be appearing to (or actually) exposing something meaningful about themself.

5. Which I have shared before.