D'ark Media

Road to Born & Raised

I started thinking about the VIP tent at Born & Raised because Jamie Lin Wilson mentioned that she plays with her band Wednesday night and then plans to park herself there for acoustic sessions.

That caught my attention because if I were a performer at this festival, that is exactly where I would be.

I wouldn’t want to play my set, pack my shit and disappear. I would want to know who else was there. I’d want to meet more musicians and hear performances I might not otherwise hear. An acoustic session makes that even more interesting because there is an intimacy implied by the whole thing. Take away the giant stage, some of the production, the lights and the carefully timed spectacle, and the mask comes down a little. The content becomes less filtered. There’s more room for something unexpected to happen.

Those are the moments I listen for.

I want to know who an artist is as a human, as a person, as an individual. I notice whether they’re nervous and whether they’re trying to hide it. I watch what happens when someone in the crowd says something they weren’t expecting. I pay attention to those moments between songs when there isn’t a lyric to sing or a rehearsed introduction to give. What do they do with the silence? What do they do with each other? What happens when something goes wrong?

Do we get to see a little bit behind the lens of what is usually a perfectly curated image?

There’s a strange thing that happens to me when I do. I become protective of them.

I know the job they’re doing. I know the pressure they feel and the mask and costume that come with being the person everyone came to see. I know that executing your art in a new environment can change the quality and shape of the sound. A different stage feels different under your feet. A room responds differently. Something doesn’t work the way it did at soundcheck. You have to adjust while everyone is watching and somehow make the adjustment look like it was always part of the plan.

Seeing some humanity underneath all of that makes the artist real to me. They stop being a foreign concept or an intangible thing.

Maybe I’m so interested in finding the person underneath the performer because I’m still trying to understand that dichotomy in myself.

I’ve spent a large part of my life being praised for being different and, sometimes in the same breath, shamed for being different by people who aren’t the same as me. Put the difference onstage and people applaud it. Put it back into ordinary life and suddenly it can be too much.

Being around people at all is performative for me.

I’m sober now, but for a long time I used alcohol to help me talk to people and to get ready to perform as “Amanda Rey.” There is a version of her who knows she has to walk around the room before and after the show, shake everybody’s hand, sign the autograph, take the picture and be whatever it is that person believes Amanda Rey is supposed to be when they meet her.

That girl is a character.

The strange part is that the woman singing onstage isn’t.

I’m not pretending when I sing. I’m the most real I can be. I’m not naturally inclined toward small talk, so performance is communication. Give me a room full of people and ask me to mingle and I have to figure out how to do that. Give me a song and I know exactly what I’m trying to say.

Being around musicians quiets that conflict in me. My guard goes down. When someone starts playing, I feel like I’m hearing my native language in a room full of foreign tongues.

So when I think about having media access to an acoustic tent at Born & Raised, I’m not particularly interested in the fact that it says VIP on the door.

I’m interested in what happens inside the room.

I expect there will be media looking for photographs of recognizable people or a sound bite they can turn around quickly and use to drive traffic somewhere. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s part of the job. I’m just looking for something else.

I want to know who I should be listening to next.

Who is the next “one to watch,” and what is it about them that makes me think so? What qualities does somebody possess before the rest of the world starts calling those qualities star power? More importantly, which of those qualities last after people start paying attention?

I’ve been lucky enough to be in this business for more than twenty years, and I’ve had that feeling before. Shawn James. Barrett Baber. Sawyer Hill. I watched all three of them skyrocket to the moon, and if I had bet on musicians like ponies in Vegas, I would be a billionaire.

I’m not claiming I made any of them successful. Their careers belong to them. What I can say is that when I was in a position to book, promote or provide opportunities for musicians, those were people I made sure had opportunities because I saw something. I believed that if they kept doing the work, one day a whole lot more people were going to know who they were, and while I had a little piece of road available to me, I wanted to put it underneath their feet.

I wish I could explain exactly what I saw.

Some of it is obvious. Most of it isn’t.

It’s how someone performs live, but it’s also how they interact with the person standing beside them onstage. It’s how they arrive at the event. Prepared or not. It’s what they expect other people to do for them and what they take for granted. It’s how they exist inside a music community when the person standing next to them has a guitar too. It’s their posturing, their body of work and their connectivity to an audience. Sometimes it’s a tiny mannerism I couldn’t explain to you afterward if I tried.

It’s an example they are setting before they realize they are setting it.

All of those tiny things go into the filing system somewhere, and eventually my brain hands me an answer.

You just know.

Maybe after twenty years, “you just know” is really another way of saying you’ve watched enough people do this that you recognize the shape of something before you have words for it.

That is what I’m taking into Born & Raised with me.

I’m not worried about whether I’ll find somebody interesting in that tent. There is always an aspiring artist waiting in the wings. There is always a manager trying to figure out how to get a client in front of the right person. There is an audience carrying expectations into a room, and somebody responsible for managing that room. There are musicians listening to other musicians, and sometimes who they’re listening to is more interesting to me than whoever has the biggest name on the poster.

Somewhere in all of that, something will catch my attention.

It always does.

And maybe a year from now, or five years from now, I’ll get to look backward and find out whether I should have bet on that pony, too.