Music Is Religion.

Especially if you’re playing it. Because as you play, you have to believe.

Singers know that you have to sell the words of a song. You might be singing that song for the hundredth time—or the twentieth night in a row—but if you’re not selling the lyric, if you’re not believing what you’re singing, you’re just mouthing words without meaning.

Music is a communicative art, and if you’re not communicating with your audience, then you’re just playing for yourself, which is more accurately classified as practicing. It was an easy lesson for folk singers, especially in the ‘60s when we were singing to stop the war, and clamoring for equal rights for all Americans, and by and by, promoting free love.

But the lesson carries over. And your audience knows it, or at least senses it. Something insincere about words being sung without conviction. Even instrumentalists, even jazz musicians far afield from the melody as they improvise their way through a song, must live up to the lyrics. Consider the great saxophonist Ben Webster, playing with Oscar Peterson and stopping halfway through a solo and walking off the stage. And later confronted confessed, “I forgot the words.”