I had a fantastic show at the Amazing Things Arts Center where I was the featured performer at the open mike last night. I can’t even put my finger on why I enjoyed it so much, but I played well (including two brand new songs that I got through without a hitch) as did Mike Delaney, who backed me, and I really had fun playing. I had brought the little flip video camera along to the show, thinking I would record video, since I try to post a “video of the month” with my newsletter and it’s been awhile since I’d recorded anything. Also, the setup at Amazing Things is unusually conducive to recording video, since there are little tables set up close to the stage on which it’s easy to unobtrusively set up a camera. But last night the setup was different – a stage set was created for what I assume is a play in production or rehearsal, so instead of a regular stage with tables in front of it, there was just the stadium seating looking on to an extremely detailed kitchen scene, in front of which the microphones for the music were set up. I decided not to record, both because there was no good place to put the camera, and because the scene might look a little weird, with me playing in a kitchen. At the end of the evening I was disappointed that I hadn’t recorded it. It was such a good show that it would have been nice to have captured it – including the encore in which we did a particularly great version of Dave Carter’s song The Mountain that had a great groove. But I also wonder if maybe the fact that I wasn’t recording it contributed to the success of the show – or, rather, that if I had been recording it, I would have performed differently. I would have been thinking about whether the song I was playing was going to come out well enough to use in a posting on youtube, and I would have been worried about whether I might make a mistake that would screw up a song that was going well (and one thing I’ve learned is that if you’re thinking about the possibility that you might make a mistake, you’re much more likely to make a mistake). In other words, I lived the show instead of trying to capture it, and I think that contributed to making it such a good show. I could draw parallels, I’m sure, to our socially-networked life and how people tweet and facebook events sometimes to the detriment of actually experiencing them. I don’t want to go too far down that road; as a musician I have to find ways to document what I’m doing if I want to be able to reach audiences. And I have found both use and community in putting pieces of my life on social networking sites. But I do think that sometimes you have to live in the moment you’re experiencing, without focusing on how you’re going to preserve or represent it later. And when you actually live in that moment, that moment is better for it.