Warren Haynes on Playing With The Dead: Trust That the Magic Will Happen

Today I read the following quote by guitarist Warren Haynes on his experiences with playing with members of the Grateful Dead:

"Playing with the Dead is all about relaxing and letting the music flow and come through you and not being in a hurry to force it to go somewhere, trusting that the music, the magic, will happen, and they’ve always been about waiting for that magic to happen and capturing it when it does happen."

This is advice I could have used a few weeks ago when I put together an Irish session at a local brewery. Even though I wasn't the best player there, I was the organizer and kind of the person in charge so instead of relaxing and having fun like everyone else, I over analyzed everything. I ended up having a good time but things could have been a lot easier if I had not been trying to force the "craic" and was just letting it happen naturally.

A few days later a couple participants told me that they had had a good time at that session, so it was then that I realized that my experience/reality was probably not the same as the others who were there. This is information worth taking to heart because tomorrow Laura and I are supposed to play some tunes at a fundraiser with a fiddler friend of ours. Instead of worrying about whether the music is jiving, I am going to try and remind myself to just settle back easy and just let the notes fall as they may.

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