Keeping it real – exciting!
When playing live, we want to sound natural, raw, we don’t want to sound so exact that it might as well be a record or jukebox playing. We want to leave a few things open to what happens in the moment – it’s all about being spontaneous! …leaving room for improvisations – and in that way “we’re keeping it real.”
Some nights when we’re live, we reach the point where a guitar solo occurs in a song and Dave will really let fly – and so in that moment, the rest of us look at each other and just say “Wow, that’s awesome” – then with a little communication, a gesture or two, we’ll usually extend, build and adapt the backing rhythms to allow Dave more freedom to “reach the skies.” It all makes it so much more exciting to experience both for us and the audience – which means never are two performances the same.
We all try to allow each other enough space to do something different within a song to give it something a little more and lift it to new heights – but we’ll rarely stretch songs out too much. It’s a fine line between adding an extra few bars to a minute of great improv., or dangerously moving into being self-indulgent.
So, we’ll aim to be fresh, exciting and always a little different from the last performance – yeah, “we want to keep it real – real fun!”
