🤩 music is hospitality
what Pixar & the Navy Seals know
RIFFS:
We’re in the hospitality business.
We’re musicians who play live. Restaurants & hotels aren’t just the places we play. They’re our spiritual cousins.
Gathering together to sing, dance, & eat… it’s a tradition as old as fire itself.
Before he was our tour manager, Sarkis ran sound in an 800-seat venue.
Each day, a different road-weary band would pull into the loading dock. It’s a long day, with a lot of people, running on very little sleep, in tight quarters… and something is always going wrong.
A friendly attitude is a superpower for band & crew alike.
Short and catchy.
Pixar, IDEO, KIPP schools, Union Square Hospitality, the Navy Seals. They all communicate their culture in shorthand, with little sayings. For my solo shows, I’m a culture of one.
But I still name my priorities & the behaviors that support them.
Charm the venue.
That’s my mantra for a behavior I’m actively working on—being every venue’s favorite performer. I learn the names of the staff & the regulars, as well as their preferences. And then I write them down so I don’t forget.
It’s not about getting others to think highly of you.
It’s about getting others to feel great about themselves.
That’s hospitality.
RECS:
I’ve read it twice, and I’ll read it again:
The Culture Code by Daniel Coyle. It’s an excellent distillation of what goes into building a great team. It’s also where I learned to make priorities & behaviors into short, catchy phrases.
I thought of it again this week while reading Will Guidara’s excellent Unreasonable Hospitality. Will ran the restaurant Eleven Madison Park, eventually getting it ranked the best in the world.
This bit resonated with me:
There’s a story about Walt Disney challenging his Imagineers when they were creating the first animatronics for the Enchanted Tiki Room. The Imagineers were convinced they had produced the most lifelike, detailed animatronic bird possible, but Disney wasn’t satisfied. Real birds breathed, he pointed out; the chest expanded and contracted. This bird wasn’t breathing.
Frustrated, the Imagineers reminded him there would be hundreds of distracting elements in the Tiki Room, including waterfalls, lights, smoke, totem poles, and singing flowers—nobody was going to notice a single bird, whether it was breathing or not. To which Disney responded, “People can feel perfection.”
Maybe people don’t notice every single detail, but in aggregate, they’re powerful. In any great business, most of the details you closely attend to are ones that only a tiny, tiny percentage of people will notice. But if I could institute a system that demanded that the entire team think carefully about even the most rudimentary of tasks, I was creating a world in which intention was the standard, and our guests could feel it.
(emphasis mine)
CHARTS:
This week we’re in Mexico.
Here’s the James Taylor song of the same name:
SMARTS:
1 - key change chorus
A few weeks ago we looked at Aerosmith’s What It Takes:
Just like What It Takes, JT’s Mexico changes key for the chorus.
He goes from the key of D to the key of E:
2 - capos & keys
Well, actually his hands play the verse in D and the chorus in E.
But he plays this with a capo on the second fret.
Because of the capo, we hear it—and the rest of the band plays it—in E and F#.
3 - two voices
We can write two parts on one staff. We separate them with stem directions.
up-stemmed notes = “Voice 1”
down-stemmed notes = “Voice 2”
This gets used a ton in choral music, horn arrangements, and drum charts. With guitar, we most often use it to show the bass movement—what the picking hand thumb is doing.
For Mexico, this is particularly helpful in showing JT’s unique fingerpicking style.
4 - the intro
Two weeks ago we talked about “pushes” or “anticipation”—going to the new chord half a beat early.
Anticipation is a hallmark of James Taylor’s fingerpicking style. Where most finger stylists keep the bass notes as steady half notes…
…JT is forever splitting bars unevenly & getting to the new chord early.
To be clear, I don’t think this is a calculated thing done for effect.
I think this is simply how he hears it—it just makes sense in his mind’s ear.
That’s all I got this week.
See you next Wednesday,
Josh
Great article. Music is so many things. I never would have put it into the same category as hospitality, but it fits perfectly. Thanks!
Interesting post Josh. I have always love JT's Mexico and all that anticipation really makes that song groove. Just love it. Thanks for analyzing it! I now have a much better appreciation for it.