What if perfection wasn’t perfect?

I had some interesting feedback from my audience about my set at the festival I played this weekend. It was the Tangled Roots Festival , a lovely and classy little festival in Somerset, I highly recommend it if you’re looking for something small with well considered, varied programming. A line-up clearly conceived by someone who isn’t just looking to get the numbers through the gates (though it was sold out!) but aiming to give the audience days worth of really great music.

I always struggle with my guitar playing, I’ve talked about this here before. I compose many of my songs with guitar parts right at the edges of what I can comfortably play, they’re intricate and particularly fingerpicked which is fine in the studio where I’m hidden away with a hefty click track and several goes at it. My thumb is fast and when relaxed keeps a steady and insistent pulse to my songs. But live it’s always a stretch for me, I don’t do what my husband suggests and “just play less notes, with a voice like that you barely need to play at all”. He might be right but I wrote these songs this particular way and this is how they go.

The truth is I’m afraid of playing my guitar in public, I’m not afraid of singing or performing in general but the way i feel about my guitar playing makes my performances imperfect. I don’t intend to simplify my compositions and I refuse to get another guitarist to play my guitar parts. (That never works anyway, fancier guitarists never play my songs better than i do they just play more precisely, at best and at worst they infiltrate the whole thing, insist that it’s a duo, and pass my guitar compositions off as there own… and so it goes…)

By refusing to let myself off easy I create a situation in which I worry, where I spend the entire car journey ( from Scotland!) boring my husband about how I wouldn’t be good enough and maybe I should stop performing. That the songs are good and yeah I can sing nicely but my guitaring would let me down so badly I wouldn’t be worth the fee and everyone would be disappointed with it. I honestly don’t know how he can stand it! But what he said was “no one wants that old prissy perfection, they want you to sing your songs” I want to believe him but I struggle with that. And i say “but it’s all so fragile and small” because that’s how i feel about it. It’s not what i think but its what i feel.

I am so profoundly wounded by the ten years I spent having my confidence at it slowly and silently strangled. Sometimes I feel like I’ll never get over it. That I’ll never truly feel like my guitaring is enough even though I know it is intellectually. It takes me a lot of strength to get up and do it each time. But i do get up and do it anyway and i end up enjoying it immensely and no one has said they want their money back because i played some less than perfect notes on the guitar.

So this time I decided to take Alec’s advice more seriously and try to approach it with the idea that a guitar flub or mistake is not a big and important thing, that’s not the point of it. I dropped a chord here and there and I laughed and on deciding to play a new song I’ve just written i needed a few goes round the intro to remember the chords in the correct order but I let myself off those and let the audience see me, the writer of those songs, unveil a brand new work in progress.

After my set a few people came to talk to me and said lovely things about my songs, my singing and my overall stagecraft. One guy said “I love how you let yourself make a few mistakes, its very human, I prefer that to performers who never drop a note, it doesn’t connect in the same way. When a performer lets there be a few little mistakes I know I’m seeing a real living thing, a unique performance” I honestly thought Alec had sent him to say that. It was so exactly what he’d been trying to tell me in the car!

So maybe all the old prissy perfection wasn’t perfect, I certainly prefer this relaxed and honest way of performing. I’m in control of it musically, my songs are front and centre which is what I always wanted. Perhaps if i learn to be in control of how I feel about it it can just be me and my perfectly imperfect performance.

(Photo Credit Jon Wilks)