Last night I watched Danny Boyle’s most recent movie, the head-trippy Trance. And yes, this blog is about music but first let me talk a second about the movie: It’s about a guy who’s hit on the noggin during an art heist. This jarring blow results in amnesia – which is a drag seeing as how he stashed the piece of art the hoodlums were trying to steal just before he was hit. Now he can’t remember where he put it. So they’ve got to go through some psychological shenanigans to bring back his memory…but the whereabouts of the stolen piece isn’t all that bubbles up to the surface. Oh boy, what are we in for now?
Well, I thought the movie was great. But then again I’ve loved every Danny Boyle movie (maybe with the exception of The Beach, but whatever). It’s filled with lots of memorable scenes and great acting. But there’s one part of the movie I liked best. It was just one line. It’s this one line in the movie that just absolutely sums up the dividing line between great musicians and musicians that are actually going to go somewhere.
James McAvoy’s character is looking into the camera and talking about what it takes to steal a painting. A lot of people think that it requires this elaborate scheme of crawling up glass, crawling through the duct work, repelling down on wires to avoid lasers, etc. Actually, most art heists are really just some guys coming in, holding up the joint, cutting the art out of the frames, and walking out. And as time goes on, nothing really changes about an art heist. “Some things don’t change. It still takes muscle and it still takes nerve.”
When I heard that I immediately thought about how it translates to music as well.
You can sit on your couch or your bed all day and practice your balls off. That’s the muscle part. Yeah, you put in the work to become adept at all these different techniques and stylistic changes. That’s great. But what are you going to do with it? That’s where nerve comes in.
I know musicians in the surrounding areas I live in that are happy playing the same bars every weekend. I see their postings about what gigs are coming up and I see the same cities over and over again. Are you really happy being the house band of some dive bar?
I see band’s recording an album and years later that box of CDs is still sitting there because they never took the time to put themselves out there. You gotta submit your stuff for review. You gotta submit to labels, webzines, whoever will hear you. Who cares that you’re bound to get some bad press.
The muscle part is easy in music. We love playing. Some of us even love practicing. But if you want to be more than a weekend warrior and a bar musician then you’ve got to work on the nerve part.
Some things don’t change. If you want to accomplish anything it will always take muscle and nerve.
