Cover Band

Last night a friend and I went to see a local cover band performing in a bar.

They were pretty good, and as live musicians no doubt better than I would be in a similar situation, at least without months of rehearsal. But it was easy to see, watching them, that almost everything about their performances was mechanical. They were playing other people's music; and although all of the skill and understanding of music was there, one never got the sense that it was anything more than machines reproducing a program. One could even see how the individual personalities inflected the way the machine delivered the sound. Even their enthusiasm for it lacked any definite real conviction. The crowd response was similar: we’re all just going through the motions here. My friend and I went through the motions too; but he is in the work, and as we exchanged glances, we two knew we were going through the motions.

It's certainly not always like that. Some musicians play very much with their essence and with the heart; and I suppose one isn’t going to see a lot of that in a cover band environment. It isn’t needed and can even easily be out of place. People don’t go to see cover bands expecting sincerity or newness; they want a reproduction of someone else’s actual sincerity.

How much of existence is actually arranged like that? Think about it. It’s worrisome, isn’t it?