It might be your last concern. All you did; all you accomplished; your successes more than your failures. When you are gone, who will remember what you have done?
That is one more consideration, one more thing that drives those who play and perform music. We want to leave an impression, like a song or a way of playing it that captivated an audience, or a recording that endures through all the changes in taste and style and genre.
If we could only write a song that lives, or record a song that it is listened to again and again for generations—or simply played a song one night with such passion and conviction that it touched an entire audience.
As Tom Cliffe says to an antagonist in The Musician, “I might not be star quality . . . but sometimes I’m damned good. Sometimes the music I make reaches into people’s guts and they feel . . . maybe as much as they can ever feel.”
It is a unique and overpowering gratification that comes from performing, “the roar of the greasepaint,” especially resonant in a well delivered song.
Mike Shaw