Demotron: "Please (Live)" in Seoul, Multi-Camera (Part 3)
"Please (Live)". We recorded our first show in Seoul, South Korea. The release date for this song is Dec 3, 2024. You can hear and WATCH it early.
If you missed Part 1, click here.
If you missed Part 2, click here.
This is Part 3.
“Please (Live)”
LIVE AT SPACE HANGANG
Dec 23, 2022
My first show with a band in Korea. I hope you enjoy this Early Listen. I hope to offer more previews like this in the future.
Why release a live recording?
I currently working on a bunch of highly stylized song recordings. These multi-layered tapestries are the best thing I’ve ever done and are insanely beautiful. The aim with these recordings is a kind of perfect mess—Art. While I build the layers of these beautiful things, I live in a world of ‘undo’. It is not reality. Reality is a an actual freaking mess. In real time, going back and fix things doesn’t exist. It’s both terrifying and peaceful at once.
I see my ‘studio’ recordings and my live performances as two separate art forms. The live show is a finite moment in time
So, before I embark on a releasing polished material, I want to share something of me that’s alive. I will continue to do this. It’s one of the central reasons I created Behind the Lights—check out this beautiful mess we made last night.
My Fear.
Nobody’s perfect. I have fears. Before a show, I’m not nervous. I’m terrified.
I’m mostly afraid of doing a bad show.
Over time, I’ve re-defined bad. I’m not Willie Nelson or anything, but I’ve done a fair bit of live shows. Early on, I stepped on all the bear traps. I used to think doing a bad show was forgetting a verse, or singing out of key. I used to measure shows by how many people showed up. These are not good things.
There’s a lot to be scared about. Fellow performers have told me the phones scare them. Everyone’s recording. What if they capture a mistake? I’ve learned to show up over-prepared.
My biggest fear is not connecting with the audience. The people who left home to see me.
I have a routine that helps me relax, which mostly involves embracing the simple—letting go. Often, the head space of on-stage performer is the opposite of what’s required to promote a show. In a way, doing the show is easier if I consider the show already completed.
What makes a a show truly great? I’m not sure.
I know it cannot be planned. You can plan everything and still have a mediocre show. Things happen. It would be foolish to say that playing live music for people is easy. There’s always some kind of problem to deal with. One learns to battle expectations with being prepared.
Sometimes, I’m shocked live shows even happen at all. There’s so many reasons to stay home these days. One little bump in the weather can render a show unattended.
My Singing Voice
It took years, but I think I may have figured out my voice. For me, it’s super challenging to reign in energy and work with a mic. This is especially true in a live show setting, where I often can barely hear myself over the band. Songwriters reading this know all about how long it takes before you realize you cannot sing the voice you hear in your head. It’s a rough moment when you realize you are not Ozzy.
For me, I learned that I have powerful baritone voice and birdlike harmonies, nearly nothing in between.
There’s always room for improvement.
My Guitar playing
A rather nervous matter. When I see people really singing well AND playing guitar live, I'm so impressed. Bass, even more so.
I enjoy singing this song with just a few guitar stabs, letting the bass and drums carry the weight. This song can sprawl, but in a comfortable way. The lyrics enjoy their space, as they plea for calm.
I felt really armed with solid guitar ideas for this show. Nevertheless, I was improvising. I even did a volume knob pad in the middle of a verse, something I'd never practiced. My thinking the entire time with the guitar was, 'make it talk'.
This Show.
Space Hangang at the time of this show was a rather new venue. I chose it because I was new too. I've not had a lot of luck booking shows in korea, so I was grateful that Space Hangang would even have me.
This was one of the coldest nights in my memory. It was -5ºF with a nasty wind off the river. My guitar was nearly frozen and all the cameras we brought had to acclimate for 45 mins before the show. The people who came out, mostly my wife's friends, were incredible.
We practiced a lot and I really wanted to do the best show I possibly could do. I learned.
The Artwork.
The art was created by my oldest musical collaborator, Shane Tise. This image is a hand drawn derivative of the digital painting Shane made for the Please studio version, with will be released later.
Conclusion
Playing with the team is so much fun. While I feel powerful as a song-maker, these live chances have a tendency to spark inferiority thoughts and challenge my confidence. I'm doing a lot, and at any moment my hands could tromp across a wrong note or my voice could drift flat. There's added concern over the fact that I'm just sitting there–not the greatest stage act. I'd truly love to just be a singer, but for now, a 3-piece band is the way to go. I like its simple power.
In the Next Episode, Part 4:
5 Months Later: Studio Dreams
I became insanely focussed in the 5 months following our Space Hangang show, not only on Please, but on 26 other songs.
Following our first successful, I started realizing a dream of recording a heap of my songs in the studio here in Seoul. The studios here are just as swanky as NYC.
My goals ballooned into a dream of returning back to the 1990s “do-everything-myself” days of 4-tracking.
The next episode will get into the creation of this studio reference and share with you the final drums Video I recorded for it.