Adam Schatz is a musician, writer, record producer and human being. His band Landlady has three records out and another on the way. He most recently produced Allegra Krieger’s album The Joys of Forgetting and has successfully cooked pad thai, soup dumplings and bagels since the pandemic began. He has a monthly Patreon page and that is currently his only monthly income, isn’t that cool? His favorite new hobby is getting emailed by coffee shops he’s been to once. Find him on Twitter here and hear Landlady here.
(Photo credit: Sasha Arutyunova.)
Recently I was in the Dekalb Market Hall, a food hall in downtown Brooklyn. It’s a nice idea on paper: lots of food vendors in one place with plenty of options. Sadly, rather than a utopia of choice, food halls tend to be a place that answers the undying question, “What if instead of sitting right down to eat, you walked three laps before deciding on something you don’t believe in?”
But this isn’t about that.
At the city food halls like this one, you’ll also notice that each stall often plays their own music of choice, and thanks to science, that means that we can hear multiple songs at once as we ponder which type of noodle will make the voice in our head stop screaming, Pick a noodle! It’s an acute bit of torture, songs that on their own would totally make my day — a cumbia from the arepa kitchen, a Venga Boys from the sushi stall — in the right headspace, I could be into all of it. Yet when layered on top of each other, it’s enough to drive one to the brink of madness. And I know what you’re thinking: “Adam, you live on the brink, you thrive on the brink.” Perhaps that used to be true. But now, as I trip over my shoelaces into aging gracefully, it’s time to give the brink some space and let things happen one at a time.*
*He says as he looks at his phone while watching the television while thinking about career changes.
Back to the food hall. On this recent visit, in an instance of don’t-you-dare-call-it-a-metaphor, we walked down the broken escalator. As we descended each step closer towards what I can generously describe as hell on earth, I realized they cracked the code — the powers that be (and we love our powers that be, people!) had found a way to make a bad thing the most bad. That’s right, say it with me: live music.
Acoustically speaking, a floor of a subterranean warehouse built to shelter 27 gestating restaurants is maybe not the best fit for the crack of a snare drum from this particular band — but even I, professional musician, man of the people, have to admit that this dude is playing the drums a little loud. The whole band, in fact, seems a bit out of place, almost as if they got Bill & Ted-ed from a beach bar in Ocean City right as they were counting in a passable rendition of “My Own Worst Enemy” by Lit, which can only be described as a passable rendition of “My Own Worst Enemy” by Lit.
Boy, were they loud. I forgot if I said that yet. This band was so loud. The low frequencies of the electric bass resonated with the deep fryers and paella pans, the higher guitar harmonics rang out ladles and spatulas, the credit card readers across the premises got jittery due to the subwoofer, and potential diners everywhere were being irked to no end. Because… who is this for? And why is this for? Nobody wins. An already chaotic environment is squared and triple stamped; a band trying to do their thing is put in the most unlovable scenario. Frankly, it breaks my modest brain.
I continued to ponder as we rode the gratefully functioning upward-facing escalator towards freedom, into the quiet and gentle air of New York City.
After I wiped the bird crap off my head and re-oriented myself, after a passing city bus farted and the construction site across the street blasted an air horn to alert everyone to “cool beam activity,” I thought more about what really was the issue here. People do know that music is good, right? It’s one of the few good things we’ve got. Other than peanut butter, the wheel, and automatic car windows, I can’t think of much else that bestows improvement into this complex modern world. So why do we put live music in environments that both bother the people being subjected to it and force the people making it to question, maybe if they took the woodshop elective instead of concert band, what might’ve gone differently in their life?
Does anything else in this world have as extreme a pendulum swing from ideal to brutal as “live music” does? The words alone send a shiver up my spine. “But Adam,” you might say, “we’re talking two categories of music here: the professionals and the sub-professionals. The professionals make music for people paying tickets to see them and the sub-professionals make music while people sit around them and order and eat subs. Surely those who are thriving above a certain career echelon no longer have to put up with talking over their music, surely they no longer have to practice Zen and the Art of Being Ignored…” But riddle me this: some of the most spiritual musical experiences I’ve had as an audience member were in small rooms usually with audiences of less than 50 people. Some of the most absolute earth-shaking, blood-swelling relationships I’ve had with song and space have occurred at the hands of people who, by capitalist terms, are not succeeding. It has nothing to do with any of it. So bite thine tongue, I say.
Likely the culprit is the terms set by the space and the people’s perception of their role in the space. If I’m in a taco area to eat a taco, that’s what I’m thinking about. I’d be rude to the taco if I wasn’t prioritizing it over whatever live music happened to be going on near by, even if they did work hard to learn nearly some of the lyrics to “My Own Worst Enemy” by Lit.
But sometimes the lines are blurrier.
I have had two recent experiences of playing music that was aggressively talked over. And the location should not surprise you. In fact, if an alien landed on my roof now, slithered down my chimney (it’s a santa alien, look it up), held me off the ground, and I yelped, “Before you flay me, can you guess the type of place I played music at where people aggressively talked over the music?” The alien would say, “Glurp… brewery.” And it would be right!
Going into both shows, I knew it would happen. I’m no dummy. Still, a tiny bit of you thinks that you can win, that you can command a space completely designed to be un-commanded in such a way that up will become down and you’ll be hoisted upon everyone’s sloppy shoulders as king of the brewpub. But of course, that didn’t happen. It couldn’t happen. Breweries are already designed to be so generally “fun” that music is never going to be given top priority over, say, an XXL Jenga or a tall glass of foamy poison. But there’s a stage. And a proper sound system. And still. People have to pick a side, and if someone is there to drink beer, or more importantly, spend a long time deciding which beer to drink, they’re gonna yap about hops and bonds with their colleagues rather than listen to your “songs” “about” your “feelings.”
No one person is to blame. This happens to the best of us. Expectations get tempered, everyone tries their darndest to make an impact, but you do leave a chatty situation always wondering why music was put there to begin with. It’s like having an orangutan as a house pet. Sure, it’s a good idea for the first five years, but one day you’ll wake up, look in the mirror, and wonder, Hey, didn’t I used to have a face? Some things shouldn’t be put where they don’t want to be.
There’s a live album from piano genius Mary Lou Williams called Live At the Cookery where a crowd audibly chatters for a good portion of the performance. I’ve played at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles to a giant crowd where enough people talked that you couldn’t ignore it. Keith Jarrett has gone the route of over-correction and has anyone who coughs in his concert hall shipped off to Mars. There’s a selfishness to a chatty audience, to be sure, though I never blame them as much as I blame their grandparents for giving birth to their parents, who then gave birth to them. But this complex modern world sure does put a lot of manic emphasis on the self, and too much self might hinder people’s perception and respect for anyone else in the room. Maybe.
Oh, what’s the point. What’s my point? Perhaps a first step is that we stop using live music as an ornament. Music can’t be treated the same as changing the wallpaper or replacing your energy efficient LEDs with Edison bulbs that look like you bought them at the International Steampunk Gastropub Expo. If we cease the use of music as vibe-setting and instead remind ourselves that harmonic overlaps in the best of hands can be nothing short of miraculous, maybe we’ll restart the reverence router. Maybe we’ll make ourselves more open to the magic around us. Maybe I won’t have to scream my double-IPA order over the sound of a funk band playing an instrumental version of “Love On Top” where tonight the role of Beyonce is played by saxophone.
Maybe I’ll keep dreaming. But if I allow myself to keep dreaming, I’ll lay my head on my pillow and imagine a world where the world’s loudest drummer counts in… one, two, three, four… and the riff of “My Own Worst Enemy” by Lit begins, and everyone shuts the fuck up and goes absolutely crazy. In this dream, I am many, many miles away from where that is happening, but I dream of it all the same.
(Photo Credit: City Point)
