Author: trytomdoyle

I was one half of Rocks and Water with a previous partner, Alexis. A talented songwriter and warm soul who introduced me to Gregory, and there was an embarrassing number of instances where I’d ask who was playing on the radio and it would be Gregory.

It became a running joke. But when I met Alanna through the Twitch music community years ago, I experienced the same thing with her music when it’d come on, and wanted to reflect on it more.

Why were there these artists that had pretty distinct styles and voices, and whose music I’d heard many times, and yet they would catch me off guard so often, like it was the very first time I heard them?

If I hadn’t played so much with Alexis, and known her music so intimately, I think she would be another Alanna Alan Isakov in my life – and that was the common thread.

 

Beauty in simplicity

They all have this incredible ability to wrap so much up in a very simple song. Little 4 note motifs that hit hard, but so subtly, shrugging their shoulders, but they’re a big deal. Some little flutter of one finger on one chord of a 1-4-5 that after you’ve heard it once sounds like how could that song exist without it? It’s one of the hardest parts of songwriting. 

Anyone can read a music theory textbook and write some textbook 4 part voice leading. But very few can look at a page of textbook 4 part harmonies, take a pen, make like two changes, and blow your mind. Make you forget who they are, and make you ask your friend who’s playing on the radio. It’s Alannalexiskov, stupid.

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— T.D.

The problem with “solo” is that it describes the number of people on the bill, not the number of people in the music. I’ve been performing alone for long enough to know that the moment a piece starts, I am not alone in it. There’s the version I rehearsed this morning, the version I played last week in a different room, the version I wrote at two in the morning when the arrangement finally made sense. All of them show up.

The word “band” is more honest. It acknowledges the collaboration — with earlier drafts, with the room, with whatever the song is asking for on a given night. It makes no promise about headcount.

The audience doesn’t come for one person. They come for the song, and the song is always made by more than one person — even when only one person made it.

I spent a long time resisting the word. It felt like misdirection — a way of making the project sound bigger than it is, or borrowing weight from a tradition of actual bands with actual members who actually disagree about things in rehearsal. But I think I had it backwards. The band name isn’t a claim about how many people are on stage. It’s a claim about what kind of thing the music is.

What the name does

It creates a container that the work lives inside, separate from the person who made it. Tommy Doyle can be wrong about things, can have an off night, can change his mind. Tommy Doyle Band is the name of a body of work. Those are different objects and they deserve different names.

There’s also something useful in the slight distance. When I write about the project, I write about it in the third person, as an external thing. That’s easier with a band name. “Tommy Doyle played a new song” sounds like a fact about a person. “Tommy Doyle Band premiered a new piece” sounds like a fact about music.

The name is a commitment to treating the work as a thing that exists independently. Which is the only way to take it seriously enough to keep making it.

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— T.D.