Even the Bad Songs Are Teachers

He is describing how he chose the songs for Millennium Symphony: months of listening on tour, four or five hundred tracks auditioned to find twenty-five worth orchestrating. And then, almost in passing:

I listen to a lot of bad songs, because I think of it as an educational activity. That way I know what music I will never take into my workshop. You don’t only educate yourself with good experiences.

We read it twice. Then we laughed, the way you laugh at something that turns out to be more serious than it looked.

Because here is a violinist who could spend the rest of his life listening only to Bach. Who has a Stradivarius and two Guadagninis at home. Who has earned, more than almost anyone alive, the right to be a connoisseur — to guard his ears like rare china and only let in what is already established as great.

And what does he do instead? He listens to the worst songs on the radio. On purpose. Because they are useful.

• • •

The bad-listening hoursThis is the part of the craft nobody romanticises.

Five or six months on tour, sitting with the world’s charts, asking every track the same question: why? What is missing here that would have made me care? Why does this hook do nothing? Why is this chord progression flat?

You cannot answer that by listening only to what you already love.

Garrett spends much of the same interview describing what has been lost. Songs have shrunk, he says. Twenty-five seconds to grab you. No more middle eights, no instrumental sections, three or four chords. He is not nostalgic about it — he is a realist. He explains, very dryly, why he himself trimmed Stairway to Heaven to three minutes on Rock Revolution: “I am not foolish enough to walk into Universal International and tell them I have a nine-minute version. They would ask, ‘Mr Garrett, how long is your contract?’”

But then he describes the exceptions. The Red Velvet guitar opening that “had to become a brass section.” Welcome to the Black Parade as Pachelbel’s Canon with eyeliner. The Joker and the Queen, one of the simplest pieces on the record, where the small melodic lines were “so precise you can make something magical out of them with an orchestra.”

That is what the bad-listening hours buy you. The instant, no-second-guessing recognition of the good one when it walks in.

• • •

The hundred-euro violinThe same generous attention shows up later, when the conversation turns from songs to instruments.

He has a Stradivarius. He has two Guadagninis. He is asked about them. His answer is not the answer you expect:

A violin worth a hundred euros, I treat the same way as the Stradivarius — with respect. It is the same as how you treat people. The time was the same. The effort was the same. It may not be a Stradivarius, but it is not about money. It is about respect.

We are quoting him in full because the paraphrase makes it smaller. The man with the multi-million-euro instrument tells you that someone’s careful work on a hundred-euro violin earned the same care. A philosophy of listening, smuggled into a sentence about wood.

• • •

The threadThe longer you sit with the interview, the more you see the thread.

He listens to bad songs because the bad ones teach. He plays the cheap violin with the same hands as the Stradivarius because the maker meant it. He is annoyed by five thousand iPhones in a stadium — and admits, in the next breath, that he himself filmed Rocket Man at Elton John’s farewell in Berlin. He will not pretend to be above the impulse. He just notices what it costs.

This is what we mean, on this site, when we use the word craft. Not the medals. Not the Stradivari. Not the sold-out arenas. The unspectacular hours — the bad-song hours, the hundred-euro-violin hours, the patient no — that make the spectacular ones possible.

• • •

So here, for the wall above the desk, is the small line we are stealing from this interview and keeping:

True of music. True of arrangements. True of concerts you walked out of, books you put down, films you wish you had not paid for, friendships you should have left earlier. The bad ones are teaching you, too — if you are paying close enough attention.

And paying close enough attention has always been Garrett’s actual job description, hasn’t it?

— The Strings Society Editorial Team