🎤The George Carlin Method
[plus: In Your Eyes]
RIFFS:
“This was a mistake. I’m not good enough.”
Louis CK’s act sucked. It took him fifteen years to scrape together that first hour of standup… and he hated it. He felt trapped by his own material.
After a rough gig, he sat in his car, crying.
He put on an interview with his hero, George Carlin.
It had taken half a lifetime for CK to come up with his shitty hour. But George released an amazing new album every single year. How was that even possible?
Then he heard the interviewer ask Carlin: how do you do it?
“I just decided: every year I’ll start over with nothing.”
Every year, Carlin:
wrote,
tested,
edited,
rehearsed,
filmed,
and released an hour’s worth of material.
And then? He never did those jokes again.
He started over.
Re-doing usually beats doing.
It’s not 10,000 hours, it’s 10,000 iterations.”
Most people don’t have 20 years of experience. They have 1 year of experience, repeated 19 times. If seat time was all that mattered, we’d all type 100 words a minute and be great drivers.
You gotta let go of GOOD to get to GREAT.
You are not your act.
In the mid-00s I developed a show. It crushed at the lakeside resort-town restaurant I built it for. But a decade later, that same show flopped at my weekly late-night city gig.
I felt trapped by my material.
It wasn’t that I sucked…
It was that my material sucked… for that context. But that new context taught me what kind of show I needed to build next. You can’t be the right fit for every situation.
You can only build capabilities over time.
But I still didn’t learn the right lesson.
That was 2016.
I didn’t create another new show for five years.
Then in 2021 I created TWO new ones.
Then it was off to the races:
2022 - redid one of the 2021 shows
2022 - bought a new guitar → created dozens of new arrangements
2022 - built the country band
2023 - started gigging with a baritone → more new arrangements
2024 - redid the country band’s show
2024 - got tired of gigging w/two guitars → rearranged all the baritone songs for standard tuning
Every new show I built was a giant leap forward.
Any excuse is a good one.
You don’t have to work that fast…
…or that slowly. But every iteration is a step forward (even the failures).
And unlike George Carlin, we can break out the old stuff any time we need to.
When in doubt, work like a comedian.
RECS:
Louis CK speaks in remembrance of George Carlin (10m video)
George Carlin’s last interview (40m read… but worth it)
CHARTS:
Speaking of re-doing…
I revisited Peter Gabriel’s In Your Eyes.
The chart I wrote in 2016 is soooo bad 😆
I tried (& failed) to make a decent solo arrangement in 2021.
But all those arranging reps I’ve put in since have made a difference—I’ve got a couple promising proofs-of-concept I’m trying out.
Here’s my chart:
Dropbox folder with Sibelius, musicXML, PDF, & Ableton files
SMARTS:
1/ the pushes
A “push” (or “anticipation”) is when we go to the next chord on the upbeat.
You hear it all the time… because it sounds cool.
The internal logic of this timing escapes me.
In both VERSEs, Bm always goes to D/F♯ on the + of 3:
But in the INTRO, every other D/F♯ is square on beat 4:
And that G to D? Hoo boy…
Got that pattern down? Great—it’s totally different in VERSE 2:
Push, square, push, push - push, square, push, push
It’s like an elaborate hazing ritual!
2/ the key change(s)
the INTRO & VERSE are in D
or maybe you’d call it B minor..
…but that’s the relative minor of D
it’s a totally academic distinction here
the PRE CHORUS is still in D, but now centered on the A chord
maybe you’d call that A mixolydian…
…which is the same as D major, only centered on A
either way, the key signature is the same (2 ♯s)
the CHORUS changes key
it’s very similar to the progression in the PRE CHORUS…
…only the progression starts with E instead of A
so again: maybe it makes sense to call this E mixolydian…
…since it’s the notes & chords of A major, only centered on E.
either way, it feels cleaner & more consistent to write it with A major’s 3 ♯s
3/ this ten-minute live version!
Things that jump out at me:
I miss the studio version’s triangle…
…and Youssou N’Dour’s vocal in the OUTRO
bassist Tony Levin creates space
for drummer Manu Katche’s fills
and then at 6:44 Paula Cole teases that Youssou N’Dour part
That’s all I got this week.
See you next Wednesday,
Josh
Damn, what a band!