Facing the same direction
Facing the same direction
I was asked in a survey if I thought “handmade guitars are better than mass produced ones”. I said no - hard working people make both. The conversation is preoccupied with the ‘thing’ when it’s really trying to describe the connection. We do that a lot. With small shop guitars (my made up phrase to more honestly portray modern guitar making) it’s that the stories of the people who make them and the people who play them are closer. That’s a special thing.
(Heart-on-sleeve warning)
The second picture is Adam Guerrero after he got his guitar out of customs. He sent it to me when I was salmon fishing on the west side of Michigan. I saw that Christmas Morning smile and I showed my friends in the boat. Two camo’d up Michiganders and one south side Chicagoan who had never caught a fish in his life on the Pere Marquette listening to a Spaniard on a guitar one of them had made. The connection is more important than “better”.
He and I have been communicating the whole time using the handy “translate” feature in the DM’s. The third picture is his reaction. Im not sharing it as a mindless marketing gimmick-I’m not here to insult anyone’s intelligence. It’s an example of what I mean when I repeat something one of the greatest guitar makers of all time, Ken Parker, said at the nerdiest (affectionately) guitar gathering: music is the most important thing in the world. A person commits their life to making instruments. Tools. Each holding sounds that influence musical choices. Another commits to playing them. A song is written that wouldn’t have been. We are most human when we recognize something about ourselves in someone else and in that boat, 4283 miles away, there was that cosmic recognition.
Music is “emotions that words alone cannot express.” Pain. Protest. Mostly love. That complicatedly simple brutal thrilling devastatingly beautiful human condition. Someone sings out loud something we’ve felt but couldn’t describe. The song could be hundreds of years old, the summer hit of the year, or it’s in Spanish. I’m watching faces in the crowd singing the same words as me, feeling the same feelings, moving the same ways.
We’re all facing the same direction.
