To No Applause

A night at the Sydney Opera House.

Photo by Brent Goldman

The shows were going great but some nights I felt empty. I was in total control but yet I still felt like a monkey, stepping on stage and doing the same tricks I knew so well. Playing the same show, the same songs every night. The fans were amazing, the shows were selling well and sure, I’d change up my versions of the various songs to feel inspired (I don’t think I’ve ever played ‘Settle Down’ the same way twice), the band would vary their performance from time to time, but I knew what would happen when I stopped. The audience would clap. I would smile. The song would start. I would move. They would look. We would do what we’ve always done. Audience and Performer. Bow and Stand. I was tired.

I think rock bottom was when I fell off the side of the stage during my headline show at The Fonda in Los Angeles. I don’t think anyone actually noticed. 

Basically, I looked to the side of the stage to begin my walk off while the band played their instrumental interlude and got blindsided by the strobes. The lights were bright, flashing and deceptive in their suggested measurements of the space they lit up. I assumed there was a fair amount of stage behind the strobes. There were curtains after all, so it seemed like the perfect place to perch while I took a break for the band to play before I ran back on stage. Well, there was no stage behind the strobes. It was a drop fall to the ground. And thats exactly what I did. I landed on my ankle. Erick The Architect, a rapper who featured on my last album ran over to me and asked if I was okay. Well, I wasn’t, but what could I say? We had a song to perform. I stood up, walked back on stage, slapped on my face a desperate smile, like I’d been electrocuted, welcomed Erick on stage and we pretended it never happened.

I didn’t feel a thing. I think they call this disassociation.

I couldn’t really tell people how hard it was. I had to keep going after all. So what was the point? But one ankle sprain later, along with a show cancellation in Ohio due to having no voice, the nights were spent curled up in my bunk on the tour bus with my dog trying to work out how I was going to keep going. I decided, something’s got to change.

You know something’s wrong when you’re not excited anymore. Music is so fundamentally exciting in the truest sense of the word. We get to make invisible feelings into audible manifestations. If it’s no longer feeling that way, something in my spirit is misaligned. And the alignment of spirit and audio is paramount to me. Kahlil Gibran spoke of his work this way. ‘I just arrange the elements to make way for God’.

I was playing the Sydney Opera House in a months time and I wasn’t excited. There, I said it. It was at this exact moment I knew something had to change. I would not let this burnout rob me of my greatest joy: live performance. 

I lifted my eyes and asked the skies, what would make me excited to play this show? 

And an interesting word emerged: Silence.

I imagined that glorious structure of the Sydney Opera House humming with the final vibrations of a song. I imagined the bass melting into the distance and the harrowing, serious arrival of silence into that space. That certainty and firm, loving absence that silence holds you in.

I imagined listening to the builders who had laid every brick. That thick hum of human presence.

Now I was excited. Now I could imagine a show I’d never seen before and it could go wonderfully or terribly.
Now I was excited. Or to use one of my favorite words: activated. 

So I did it.

I called my band and said, there’s a new sheriff in town (and by that I mean, we’re changing the show a bit, don’t worry it’ll be fine) and we had the new show together just in time. We created drones and sine waves to trigger in between songs and sketched out a new lighting concept that would help create an atmosphere of ‘holding’ between songs.

I walked onto the stage brave but prepared to flop. Interestingly, the thought didn’t scare me so much. What scared me more was stepping onto that stage checked out or ‘going through the motions’. That seemed disrespectful to something so sacred. No. I wasn’t doing this for external validation. I was doing this to reignite my love again. 

That night I asked the audience to not only withdraw their phones but to also withdraw all applause between songs.

As each song moved from structured formats to improvisational dialogues, eventually all sound fell away and together a sea of 2000 people bathed in an iridescent blue light came to complete stillness for six whole breaths with me. After every song.

Photo by Jordan Munns

We pushed through the initial discomfort of such raw togetherness, until that awkwardness subsided, and the room became caring. The air was poised with us. The attention moved from audience and performer on stage, to our shared experience of listening. Our curiosities swayed to one another. The artist was not creating the show, she was facilitating its arrival. Making it feel safe. We welcomed some weary stranger into the room that night. The room itself! We settled into our new role as one living organism. We felt held. We were resting together. I can’t think of a more intimate experience to share with an audience.

I’ve played thousands of shows and this was the single most fulfilling, generous, life affirming and connective live experience I’ve had to date. 

Without the immediate external validation I’ve grown so used to as a performer, I was left with the sound of my own Self. As the grumbles of restless activity dribbled out, I felt the simple weight of human beings inside a space, together, reaching and holding. I was not the focus once the music stopped. We were. 

This is when I realized something. This is what I want to do in the world. Create spaces for us to experience our interdependence. Celebrity culture has convinced us the answer is always outside of us. What if it’s right under our noses but we can only show each other that when we are quiet?

“Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery it is. In the boredom and pain of it, no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it, because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.” 

- Frederick Buechner

I’ll be speaking more about this Sydney Opera House experiment-in-presence for my next post. But for now, I’d just like to say, the world is worthy of reflection and that takes patience and patience is learned (or in my case, urgency must be unlearned!). As I practice slowing down, I invite you to do so with me. I can already feel that this commitment to weekly writing is going to breathe new life into my music as well as helping to slow me down throughout my various seasons, light and dark as they may be. 

Till next time,