A few weeks ago I read an
article written by
Death Cab frontman, Ben Gibbard, on Paste magazine's website. In it he briefly discusses the idea of development, that it took time and rough patches for the band, and for him, to be what/who they are today. Here are some of his words:
I can unequivocally say that I’m so glad we were one of the last bands to break before the Internet got crazy. We actually had some time to develop. I hate hearing people say, “I went and saw this band—everybody’s saying they’re really great—but I went and saw them last night and they weren’t any good live.” You know why they weren’t good? Because they’ve never done more than five shows in a row, and now they’re two weeks into a tour—their first national tour. They don’t know how to get to the shows, they don’t know how to sleep right, they don’t know where to find food. They don’t understand how to make a set list somebody cares about. You can’t blame these bands for not being great yet. We were terrible when we first started playing. Our shows were so fucking boring.
One of the things I continue to notice in our culture is an increasing orientation around immediacy, how we rarely give time for the paint to dry much less allow something to actually grow and develop. Everything must be completed immediately, and as soon as it is done it must become public. And so we are in a constant state of both discovery, because new things are being shared all the time, and creation, because we must share to stay relevant with everyone else's sharing (my thoughts on the impact this trend has on such things like longevity, sustainability, quality, etc. will have to hold off until a later time). Prolific blogging and an overwhelming amount of YouTube videos attest to this, but for me an area it seems deeply evident is conversation. Again and again, I leave discourse feeling that much of what was shared (including, sadly, my input) were sound-bites for the moment: small thoughts that were punchy & intelligent, but had little bearing on actual real life: how one might go about living.
As one orienting his life around Jesus' perspective of the world, I can't help but notice how much of the way Jesus describes life is through agricultural parables: story after story of seeds being planted, fields being harvested, waiting for fruit to appear on the trees. In a world of immediacy, where emphasis is on being the most recent to produce, I am struck that Jesus' perspective seems to be opposite: plant, nurture and wait, for good things take time. Over and over, I need to be reminded that all the rich things in life, from music to character to ideas take time. It is time that allows them to develop into their fullest potential and it is time that helps us to appreciate them for what they are.
Oh, and the Death Cab show tonight... amazing. So much so that I immediately came home and blogged about it!
(As a confession: the pressure of immediate production was one of the reasons I pulled back from this blog. I found myself ever attempting to force intelligent, humorous ideas without giving myself the space to allow them to mature naturally. What a drag that was... errr is!)
