When the audience is awful you can still have a great night and people will walk out thinking they had a great time even though there was loads of loudmouths and the sound was terrible.
I would say that if you don't feel like talking to the crowd something is wrong and if you force yourself to talk to them things will happen and to that extent things aren't choreographed.
I was taking a nose dive somewhere between eleven and twelve because my sister had died and I was practicing something that siblings do which is follow in their footsteps and die as well.
I was required by Capital to release one every six months and the fastest I could do with all my touring was every nine months, and it would spook me every time because I never had what I needed and I really didn't want to do covers.
I think that open tunings are a trap really because it's really hard not to sound like an open tuning when your using one and that gets old as well as what you learn in one open tuning is going to stay there.
I seem to find different material every four to six months and I frequently forget it which is a shame because it would be nice to have a bigger library.
It is not a mystical thing, however, it is obvious and practical and I think that what the performer does is to try to get to that point with every choice you make from the phrasing in a tune to the choice of tunes.
I don't spend a lot of time thinking of what they'll do musically, I try to imagine being locked into a windowless room with this person for twelve hours at a time. If you can look at that and think it might be fun then maybe you've got the right musician.
I do have a library of events I can talk about and I always expect to find a different point of view on it so even if I talk about the same event in the same town it's fresh.
We spent a lot of time on that record with the sound and recorded it on the Paramount sound stage which is this huge room where the sound is reflected but the reflection is so late and comes from so far away that it doesn't blur the music but gives you a room nonetheless.
