He was an artist I definitely would have liked to have seen live, but he didn’t seem interested in touring.  I’m not sure why that was the case.  I mean, I know he was shy, but there are plenty of shy artists who get into touring, I would think.  It always struck me as odd that he didn’t want to get close to his audience the way most people do, but I suppose he was one of those more reclusive artists who loves the studio and making music and is a bit overwhelmed by the adulation of the masses.

***

I’ve never thought that being shy about touring was unusual.  There are a lot of bands and musicians who have found the interaction between audience and performer to be troublesome and problematic.  The Foo Fighters, in “Congregation,” sang about the voice up on the stage being a heart inside a cage.  Nik Kershaw, in “Somebody Loves Me,” talks about the asymmetry that exists between an artist and an audience.  The artist needs the audience, often as encouragement during the loneliness of performing and the feeling of being isolated by criticism and a difficulty in relating to others, while the audience believes that they know an artist because of his art, even if that knowledge is only partial and second-hand.  I always found that performances were somewhat overwhelming, in that one would feel an incredible high from a supportive audience, only to be crushed by the comedown when one was all alone afterward, and I didn’t feel I was up to doing that hundreds of times a year.  That doesn’t mean I didn’t want to perform in concerts ever, just that touring wasn’t something I found very appealing.  Admittedly, I could have done touring if I had self-medicated, but I didn’t want to do that either.  You’ve seen commercials with country singers using Five Hour Energy to stay wired enough to perform, but I didn’t want to do that.  Other performers have used tried and true alcohol use to calm their nerves but I wasn’t interested in doing that either.

***

It’s not as if live performance is everything.  Given the rumors we heard about his massive amount of studio tracks, it was probably the case that #N/A preferred to make new music than he did to play familiar songs before audiences day in and day out.  Maybe that would have changed some time.  I could see it as possible that he would have built up a strong body of work and then performed in a low-stress way as a legacy act to large groups of adoring fans for large amounts of money.  Even if he had ended up as a one-hit wonder with “Beside Me” in those circumstances there would have been some material to sing while ending every concert with that song, but those are just pipe dreams I guess.  We’ll never see how he would be able to transition from an immensely productive musician to someone who could take more time and craft his songs more and only release the best material and tour a lot.  Instead, at least we managed to get more material than we would have gotten from most people under those circumstances.

***

There are so many directions his career could have taken.  Let’s look at what we saw from him initially.  He started with a few hooks on some enjoyable pop rap songs, then a massive ballad and a debut album that had a couple of strong covers and a mix of songs from a singer-songwriter and pop-rock vein.  None of that signifies someone who is going to change music, but rather someone who is going to make competent and occasionally good music.  But the music that came out afterwards was quite striking.  Who comes out with a double album, a concept album, of covers with a charitable purpose the way that he did?  Who thinks to make a live album that is a double album of different pop and country songs like he did?  Who thinks to make a set of albums with titles in Latin?  His debut album and early material only hinted at the strange directions his career could have gone.  I would have liked to have seen where it went because I was very impressed with the material he released after his hit single.  Most people would have just tried to repeat it, or would have avoided popular music altogether, but he made music that was odd and quirky and that was something I was very impressed with.

***

I often remember urging #N/A to perform live more, but there were some barriers to tours.  For one, it was hard to get the right kind of venues and prices.  He didn’t think of himself as an arena singer, but it was hard to get venues that were intimate enough to work out either because he didn’t have enough hit singles to justify the high prices that LiveNation was looking to charge.  He also didn’t want to sing on the Sabbath, and that meant that we couldn’t really perform most Friday nights or Saturday nights, which was certainly a barrier to doing the long tours that others did.  All of that is in addition to the fact that he was a really anxious person–his debut album title of “High Anxiety” was no joke, he was really anxious.  So when you take an anxious person with strong religious convictions about not performing on certain times of the week and the difficulties in logistics when it comes to finding intimate venues for him, it’s not too surprising that he was never a big live performer.

***

People often ask me if I am going to sing live more often, and I tell them that I would be happy to perform under certain circumstances, but that I don’t think at this time that I will be the sort of live performer that people would expect me to be.  I think the Sabbath issue is a particularly serious one.  Let’s talk about what goes into making a concert.  You set up a schedule that allows you to perform as often as possible in different cities.  After traveling from one city to another you get to a place that isn’t set up and you have to make sure all your instruments and microphones are wired in.  You do some soundchecks and then hang around on the bus for a few hours and eat and write and read some.  In the evening, people start showing up and you go backstage while the warm-up act performs.  Then you come out and play for an hour or two, meet the fans for a bit afterward, and then you have this comedown where you’ve just spent a few great hours with some wonderful people and it’s time to try to get some sleep while the bus drives you somewhere else where you can be as anonymous as possible or go to some radio station.  It’s not a very exciting life, but if you’re a good enough act and your performance deal is good enough you can make a lot of money doing it, even without the merch you sell.  But cutting out two days out of a week makes it more difficult, and I found myself in a place where my sound wasn’t the kind that would translate well to arena stadiums where you can perform for tens of thousands of people but I wasn’t the sort of act that was able to charge hundreds of dollars for people to see in a very small and intimate venue.  There weren’t a lot of venues that combined the intimacy as well as the right size to perform, and then when you add the fact that one can do at most five shows a week at max, and the result was that I haven’t yet been able to work out a tour deal.  I hope to in the future, though.  It would be fun.

***

You asked me about why I used the examples I did when it comes to performing rarely.  They aren’t the only artists who don’t or didn’t perform live very much.  I remember writing some years ago about Whitney Houston after she died, and she wasn’t an artist who performed live a lot either–remember the criticism she got about the pre-recorded national anthem she did for the Super Bowl in Tampa that ended up being a hit song?  Anyway, let me look this up, ah, here is what I said then:

It just so happens that even though this song is one I frequently listen to, that today I was provided with a particularly sad reminder of the song’s meaning, in reading about the death of Whitney Houston of unknown causes (presumably related to her years of drug abuse). Unlike Nik Kershaw, Whitney Houston was a big star, and one who was clearly destroyed by her own demons, like so many other people. Her shared drug addiction with her ex-husband Bobby Brown took her away from the love of millions of fans, took her away from her career in music, took away her voice, and ultimately took her life.

It is useful here to see Whitney Houston’s rather sparse record of tours. Despite a career with almost 25 years of hits, she only had three tours of longer than 100 shows: in 1987-1988 with her Moment of Truth world tour, in 1991 with her I’m Your Baby Tonight world tour, and in 1993-1994 with The Bodyguard world tour. Her next sizable tour after that was her 1999 My Love Is Your Love world tour, and then it was not until 2010 until her next sizable tour, the Nothing But Love world tour, a tour marked by bad reviews and a clearly fading voice [2] [3].

For the vast majority of the 1990’s and 2000’s, Whitney Houston’s increasing drug abuse, increasing problems with her troubled ex-husband, and her decreasing musical output kept her away from her fans, the people who loved her, and who would have given her encouragement had they known how much she suffered. Most of us are not vicious people interested in bloodsport. We would rather appreciate someone who could sing powerful performances like her remake of Dolly Parton’s “I Will Always Love You” than to cheer at the demons destroying her peace of mind and sanity.

But now she has gone to the grave, where no encouragement can reach her, and we can only wonder once again at the waste of talent, remember her performances, which in light of her untimely demise take on a greater sense of bittersweet melancholy, and keep her memory alive, and hope for a better future for her daughter, who is now left motherless. It is a shame that stars are brought so high only to be pummeled and brought so low, and a shame that those same stars often cut themselves off from those they need to feel loved and appreciated. Perhaps stars would be better served if they allowed themselves to feel loved by their audience, and perhaps we would be better served to recognize that the stars we care about so much more beyond their actual importance in this world are usually deeply troubled souls themselves, in need of all the encouragement we can give them.

I stand by those words now.  We stars are often troubled people who struggle to relate to other human beings and have happy relationships.  I’m certainly no different.  Even if am a pretty wealthy person, it’s not like it would be easy for someone to be in a relationship with me.  I’m anxious, I struggle with communication, I’m often expected to travel on the road and it’s hard for people to trust.  When I’m not around lots of other people I don’t want to be around anyone else and that’s not ideal for people you would be living with or trying to see on a regular basis.  Obviously, like everyone else I would like love, but the terms of being with me aren’t something that everyone would be happy with.  Do you want the subjects of your fights and arguments to be inspiration for things that millions of people will hear?  Probably not.  Is it hard being someone who has to try to encourage someone to be the best version of themselves when they have lots of attention and people telling them what they want to hear?  Yes, absolutely.  Is it hard to find people who can relate to one’s problems when there are thousands if not hundreds of thousands of people who would want to be a replacement partner even for a plain looking guy like myself?  Absolutely.  It’s not a surprise that so few people have been willing to be in a relationship.  Fame isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.