Last weekend, on the Grammy’s, while accepting Best Rock Performance, Dave Grohl thanked those who helped the band on their latest album, and gave a very cool speech:
“To me this award means a lot because it shows that the human element of music is what’s important. Singing into a microphone and learning to play an instrument and learning to do your craft, that’s the most important thing for people to do… It’s not about being perfect, it’s not about sounding absolutely correct, it’s not about what goes on in a computer. It’s about what goes on in here [your heart] and what goes on in here [your head].”
He continued to clarify later on on a post…
“And, unfortunately, some of these great advances have taken the focus off of the actual craft of performance. Look, I am not Yngwie Malmsteen. I am not John Bonham. Hell…I’m not even Josh Groban, for that matter. But I try really fucking hard so that I don’t have to rely on anything but my hands and my heart to play a song. I do the best that I possibly can within my limitations, and accept that it sounds like me. Because that’s what I think is most important. It should be real, right? Everybody wants something real.”
I want to post this here because I agree with Dave here. He wasn’t dissing musicians that use other tools (any form of electronic music, for instance). He was talking about the greatness and warmth of having something real. Music that sounds its played and sung by people. When we lose track of that (in music, or design, for that matter) we lose what is most important, what is interesting and what is unpredictable.
