by Mark Kaufman » Tue Jun 26, 2012 8:15 am
cj, I think I understand why you view it the way you do, and you're welcome to your suppositions about how it REALLY is with me, as opposed to my own experience of said lifetime. But I don't agree with your description. I do indeed play my songs for people, and I do indeed crave and enjoy getting a response to my songs.
But I was talking about reviews. Dedicated, writerly, critic-ee reviews.
Reviews bore the crap out of me now, whether I'm giving or receiving. They are boring. Yours are in fact the best I've ever seen. Seriously, when I think of the awful reviews in Rolling Stone, which is probably the dream job of any rock critic, and imagine putting any one of them next to any one of your serious efforts, it's just laughable. You could own that department.
Was getting reviews here some sort of life-changing event for me? Sorry, no. They were certainly not the first to huwt my feewings, nor were they the first to be relevant, honest or incisive. They were just real good, and this particular community is indeed a strongly focused one that gives consistently great reviews, whether they're positive, negative or both.
That said, I'll reiterate the plain old factual point: formal reviews are not what drive me to make music. MUSIC is what drives me to make music. People's response to it is certainly interesting and important enough...but it's not the music. It's more like talking about the sex you just had...always an interesting conversation, but it's not why you fuck. Not at all.