Anyone Can Play Guitar
This month (in all honesty, a few months ago — when we first conceived of this project) Nils has challenged me to play, record and share a song of my choosing on guitar.
Our first Make+Do challenge.
In the dim and distant past I used to play guitar. In the sense that I occasionally pick it up, bash out a song or two and put it back down, I still do. But there no longer seems to be the long and unfilled hours with which to mess around with song after song. To play and sing something over and over until it sounds just how I want it or to try something new; loudly, badly but with gusto or to tumble through my entire “back catalogue” medley until I’m hoarse and my fingers are red raw.
These days, time with my guitar is snatched here and there — when I’m waiting for the kettle to boil, or about to leave the house, or in moments of procrastination. I’ve always found singing and playing to be quite a private thing. Having said that, I’m not stage-shy (although don’t put me in front of a mic, deargod. Or on an actual stage for that matter.) I’ll happily accept an audience (but I don’t do requests.) I love making lots of noise with other voices and instruments. But I’ve found lately that I enjoy these public performances less and less. Practise doesn’t make perfect but it does at least keep you vaguely in the right ballpark and at least playing the right sport. Its the hours of digging away at a tune, enjoying the moment for myself, with just some bits of wood and steel and your lungs for company that were the fire in my music making. I’ve lost that.
Occasionally in times gone by I’d have a notion to record myself. I don’t think I’ve ever committed any of my “go-to” songs to video. The purpose was always a way of hearing myself from the outside, so usually I’d be recording something that wasn’t going too well. All the same, there’s a wee thrill with putting it out there for comment and critique (and nowhere on Earth has more critique the the YouTube comments section…).
This Make+Do challenge was a refreshing opportunity to make myself make the time for something that used to be an everyday part of my routine. Choosing a song I’ve known for years but never recorded and rarely play now, I spent a glorious afternoon singing myself silly. I probably made 15 recordings of this one after another. I think I used the third one in the end. Its not perfect but that was never my musical style. And it is finished.
Radiohead’s Thinking About You from their debut album Pablo Honey. Appropriately, the following song on the album is Anyone Can Play Guitar.
The alternative track choice was Bruce Springsteen’s Dancing In The Dark. I had never tried to play it before. Sight-reading the chords, I recorded my first, second and third attempts. It was fun, but perhaps taking the “finished not perfect” mantra a little too far.
