The recorded version is so good. You got the groove just right, comped a great vocal from a bunch of takes, compressed the low end nice and punchy…it’s really a thing of beauty.
So you start playing it live.
But it never hits quite like the recording. Night after night you’re trying to get it to that level but it never happens.
And then…finally on the perfect night you play it even better than the recording…which is even worse…because now the recording isn’t all that it was cracked up to be.
You see the cycle here.
You want to make sure the recorded version is a good one because that’s the one that gets passed around the most and is going to live on after you’re dead. But the game we sign up for as artists isn’t to surpass the recorded version or the version we played last night…rather, the game is to see what we can do this time.
