Back at the dawn of popular music, live performance and recording were not greatly dissimilar. When Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five went into the studio near the beginning of the last century, there was a single microphone. The mic, and the musicians for that matter, were positioned and repositioned until the balance was right. When Armstrong played live, there was no microphone; where they stood was determined by Louis and the dimensions of the bandstand. But everyone played together.
With the introduction of multitracking, live and recorded music diverged and emerged as separate art forms. Live is kinetic and visual; momentary lapses in musical precision fly by in a pulsebeat; we’re held by the moment we’re in. Recordings are precise, repeatable and subject to the scrutiny that familiarity brings. I think that songs need the precision of a recording to endear themselves and a live performance to consummate the relationship.  Live is physical contact; recordings are long distance love.
But you can’t get physical on a website. Not on this one, anyway. There are functions crucial to a live performance’s success that, in the studio, are just easier or more expedient to do piecemeal. You can play multiple instruments, adding ideas and parts as inspiration strikes. If a player is unavailable, the music goes on.
All of this was brought to mind by a song of ours called ANGRY WORDS. The song is not a Postcard Comets duo performance. But everyone we consider a Comet is on there— same writer, producer, vocalist, and guitarist as the other songs we’ve featured on the site. But this song has a different feel, thanks substantially to the players we don’t regularly feature, but also to our intention to capture the energy of “live”. Why try to blur dissimilar disciplines? Same reason anyone does, I suspect – it seemed best for the song. For me, that’s always the destination.
David Partridge