Interview:

Music is what holds it all together. Everything has a vibration, and that is how things hold their form. Music is without form, and it IS vibration, so in a sense it is EVERYTHING. It is nothing and everything at the same time. It is worthless and yet priceless. Music is hard to market in its purest form because it gives without needing to receive anything back and this creates a big problem for those who want to live in material comfort out of the proceeds of their musical activities. I always think that the problem with living off it is that there is a great temptation to repeat oneself ad nauseam. You play the same song a lot and people love it more and more, and want you to repeat it more and more. It’s a self-stroking cycle of repetition for the sake of commercial gain. That is why it’s safer to play songs people know already, and yes it does make sense if you want to live off it. I have avoided this like the plague but probably more out of simply not being bothered. On the other hand, I have been caught in musical ruts from playing my repertoire over and over and not expanding it enough. Music is something we can not control and in due course I get a wake up call, something will happen to make it clear it’s time to move on, that it’s time to work in new ways. It all takes a long, long time. Things that logically seem easy are the hardest to pull off. Keeping it simple comes from experience and life working on you to bring about a result that is better than what you were aiming for. For instance, I had a series of mishaps with equipment and ended up replacing defunct gear with equipment that did the same job as before but weighed half as much. The end result was “less is more”. No big freight bills, fewer noise complaints, a much easier life carrying my equipment and packing in and out. It’s experience that does the trick.

I admire people who have both the theory and the experience, but experience is king. People often want a lot less than we think and yet they want more dedication from us. You have to be there for people. You have to study how they respond and try to communicate in a way that they understand. Music is a language that needs to be spoken and heard, and the conversations we have with an audience are fascinating, it’s all about EMOTION. And THAT is the key to it all! The FEEL of the music. How passionate is it? How much do we really care about what we are singing about? How much do we care for the people who support us?

The economy was taking the very life out of it, but music is like quicksilver and it evades capture! Like when Napster came along and all the other free sites following. People do want to support musicians but the music business was COMPELLING them to pay. We cannot compel without expecting a backlash and it came. Now you can get great music for free. Now the only way to survive is to physically turn up and play live and even then it’s often required of us to play gigs for nothing. The quality was being compromised by commerce. The commercial world has to realize it’s limitations. You can’t actually SELL music. Music is not for sale. You try to sell one kind of music and a superior form of the same style appears for free. It’s an infinite resource so how can it be sold? It’s infinite in supply so how can it actually be worth a material return? It is spirit, so how can it yield a material result? Fact is it can’t. Music is spirit and has NOTHING to do with commerce. Artists get supported according to the love of the people who are moved by their sound, in an ideal world. Ok so it is not an ideal world is it? But we aim for better and better, and in some niches you can find great work and it often doesn’t rely on large amounts of cash pumping it.

Real music cannot be captured; it’s of the moment and for the moment, and the idea of recording it, and claiming that it’s still music is a dubious claim. I do this. I claim to have “music in a bottle” just like the next guy, but in the end my only proof is playing live. It has to be backed up in real life or no one is interested, unless you get into movies and hit the soft spot in peoples’ consciousness where they retreat back into a dark room, and allow all kinds of weird and wonderful images and sounds to influence them, but that’s just selling a dream, playing live is the real deal. Music is alive so keep it live.

“Real music cannot be captured; it’s of the moment and for the moment.”
– Luke Hurley, guitarist and singer-songwriter