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I just don't know what I would do without it [music]. Life would just be one bleak, horrible, awful, terrible, awkward social situation to the next. It's the only thing that keeps me going, to be perfectly honest: the hope that some new song is gonna come around the corner.
-Trey Anastasio |
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Artists realize that by making their work public, they are opening the gates to both heaven and hell. Public scrutiny is inevitable, perhaps even necessary. But no matter how deeply or critically you explore Trey's work, the simple fact remains that he's a genius. When he is at his best, he is one of rock's most remarkable improvisational guitarists. Like the artists who inspire him - Miles, Young, Dylan - Trey seems able to tap into the cosmos and connect with something for which we have no words. As Police drummer and Oysterhead cohort Stewart Copeland recently said, "Trey is a force of nature." If you've seen Trey at those moments when he's lost in sound, drool almost dripping out of the corner of his mouth, you can attest to that.
Trey Anastasio by Tony Stack |
"What I'm doing when I'm staring out over the crowd," he explains, "I'm listening for the music coming out of the air and then I'm just playing that. A lot of times I try to just stare up into the lights till they sort of blind me and I start to see colors and stuff. And if I look right into the lights, my glasses have moisture on them so they start to break into prisms and stuff and then voom, I'm gone."
Trey Anastasio is the rare kind of artist who can help us expand our horizons beyond our little sliver of the world. "You're never supposed to actually get [to perfection]; you are an imperfect human being, you're broken," he says. "But if you can point for a second, maybe in a way like developing a skill - guitar playing, painting, plumbing, anything - and you just point out a little bit that there's something bigger than us, God or whatever, then you are doing a service to people because then they can have that ten seconds of time when the car drives by [with music coming out the window] and they can be saved for a second from the drudgery of life."
When Trey talks about playing guitar, it's impossible not to get caught up in his passion. He was clearly put on this planet to play music; at times it seems like sound is all he has. Time and again, he makes reference to how music "saves" him: "It's the only place I can live. It just saves me many, many different times a day, in the weirdest ways, and it's kinda always been that way."
Music is his salvation, but it's also his main form of interaction with the rest of the world. "It's the most emotionally available form of communication I've found by far, going both directions," he says. "I can reveal my own emotions in a much safer way than talking. I get really tangled up when I try to talk, I do the best I can, but sometimes with playing music, it's safe. Like I can be really, really, really sad or really, really happy and express that to someone without fear of reprisal. So there's that, but then there's also just the music itself, just melody and harmony can tear me up. I just don't know what I would do without it. Life would just be one bleak, horrible, awful, terrible, awkward social situation to the next.
"It's the only thing that keeps me going, to be perfectly honest: the hope that some new song is gonna come around the corner."
JamBase | San Francisco
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