“You’re seeing now a veteran of a thousand psychic wars,
I’ve been living on the edge so long, where the winds of Limbo roar.
And I’m young enough to look at,
And far too old to see, all the scars are on the inside.
I’m not sure that’s there’s anything left to me”
Blue Oyster Cult – “Veteran Of The Psychic Wars”
Here I go again.
I have had many attempts in my past to start a blog with varying degrees of consistency, that is to say no real consistency, and they have all fallen into obscurity. Now it is 2020, and I am bringing to life a new blog idea called The Method Guitarist.
To be honest, I have had this blog site registered since 2017 and have probably been imagining it for many years prior. The truth is that I spend an obscene amount of time in my own head trying to make sense of who I am as a musician/guitarist as well as a human. I have probably written sketches of dozens of entries. There are files that have existed on multiple computers and iPhone Notes and follow me everywhere waiting to be expanded and published.
I have titled it The Method Guitarist based on the common, and probably misguided pop culture, notion of a “method actor” where in an effort to bring forth the truest performance of a character, an actor loses themselves into the process of creating all aspects of the character and living in the character 24 hours a day. In my case, I am realizing that all the things I strive for in my guitar playing and musicianship, things such as tone, emotional honesty, creativity, etc. are all found when I surrender to the idea that the way I play guitar is intrinsically connected to me. I am the character that I want to discover and bring to life through music.
That may seem odd to say but when you think about it, there is always some self-help guru trying to sell advice on how to live “authentically” and I think this is the result of a learned behavior in society where we present images of ourselves like masks but are afraid to know the real person behind the mask. We can convince ourselves that this is who we are but really it is just an illusion.
I have noticed these tendencies in myself so I have declared war on this illusion and the ultimate goal is fighting back and bringing forth the true authentic person within.
“War” is a heavy handed metaphor for what I am describing but would you believe that artists and creatives are prone to hyperbole?
So I sit here at my computer and express my thoughts in the hope that I am able to come to some sort of self-discovery. At the very least I will allow my brain a respite from constantly holding in all these feelings and ideas. And who knows, maybe this will resonate with someone out there as well.
-G