Touring and Texting and Touring and Texting and Texting

When you tour, you get lonely.
Its weird to play in front of 1000 people. To have people respond to you playing drums is pretty weird. I beat the fuck out of drums and people cheer.
Its a thing I don’t thing has been very well understood. I don’t know of any studies on it.
I read once that Keith Richards said his drug use was from when the tour stopped. While he was on tour, it never got out of control because he had the excitement of the shows as a drug high. Makes sense.
But that thing sticks with me pretty hard. Theres a lot of angles to it that I often think about.
I don’t really like drugs. I did them and now i don’t. I think they have a place.
Not the point of this article.
What happened is I was texting my wife here in my hotel and we had the most insignificant difference. She was excited to help me with my social media and i changed a password. About that level of serious.
But i got super upset. Like actually started crying.
Pretty dumb for sure.
But, I think its all part of this same phenomena.
On the one hand technology allows for us to be in contact with one another. I run my whole business through my phone. I get texts from drivers 24/7. I do all my quotes and sales through email and my accounting through the quickbooks app.
But there is a down side to this. I think a massive one.
The spiritual connection you get with someone is one of the things that Im always thinking in the back of my mind. Or the front of it. Its always there.
But I’m in love. I truly have a person i love to the core. Many people don’t. So its super lucky and rare.
But my point is that the method by which we communicate, through these little sequential texts, these instagram posts, these emails. They seem to be breaking down something.
The best way I can explain it goes back to Steve Albini and his love for tape and analog recording. He’s pretty well known as the guy who carried the torch for analog.
This is the best analogy, although its a fairly abstract one.
When you record on tape, you get a continuous magnetic wave form transferred from the source (microphone or plugged in instrument)
Its a continuous energy transfer.
Compare that to digital recording.
A computer hard drive takes 1000’s of pictures of you singing a continuous note and converts it into 1’s and 0’s and stores them on a hard drive.
This gives the illusion that its a continuous note. But its not. Its not a natural phenomena. Its a digital copy of the natural phenomena.
You can’t Autotune a piece of tape.
You can autotune a digital file.
But what is the thing between those 1’s and 0’s that gets lost?
I think this is what texting and technology has snuck into our lives.
The idea that its all micro seconds of time, broken down.
As opposed to the continuous wave of life.
Touring is a continuous motion.
Texting is start, stop, stop, wait, start, 1…0…0…1….1. all going across a global illusion of space between people.
The space between is where we loose the understanding between one another.
The space between is the gap where depression awaits.
That space is the hole that technology will never fill. So it needs to back off in our lives so we can connect and stay connected to one another.

Author: Ian

Share This Post On

Submit a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *