Friday, July 16, 2010

Lady Gaga changd my life . . .



I always respected Gaga's extraordinary visual imagination and songwriting abilities, but this performance doubled my admiration for her. It shows off her voice, performance skills, piano playing, and rock 'n roll attitude. As a singer in training, I'm wowed by anyone who sounds good live and it was nice to see her performing at her instrument without all the potentially distracting clothes and dancers and sets, etc. She's so skilled at putting on a spectacle that I think it sometimes distracts from her sheer musicianship.

As far as the rock 'n roll attitude, there are very few who can pull this off. It's a spiritual orientation and a powerful, devil-may-care charisma that few possess. No woman has ever nailed it to my satisfaction with the exception of Alanis Morisette. So big props to Gaga for taking us to that place . . .

Oh yeah ... I switched from piano to guitar some years ago feeling that the piano didn't let me "rock out" enough . . . but there was something about this performance that made me want to revive the piano playing again.

Thank you for inspiring me, Miss Gaga!

2 comments:

Andrew said...

I like the tea cup. If I were famous I would totally drink tea on stage :)

It's funny, I took piano lessons when I was younger but switched to guitar as soon as my parents would let me. I love guitar, but now sometimes I have a strong urge to rock out on the piano, and then am disappointed because I really can't.

Kristin said...

Hey! Thanks a lot for responding to my blog! You made my day. I know exactly what you mean about rocking out on the piano . . .

You know, something that's helped me is connecting more deeply with the back beat in rock music and feeling that inside me somehow. And then it's not that you replicate that backbeat exactly on the piano, you can't . . . but you feel that back beat inside you and play around it, in the "spaces."

Also, I've been working a lot on my vocals and you can make the piano rock out a lot more when either you or someone else is singing along in a rock style . . .

Another idea is that piano as a rock instrument sounds especially good to my ears when it emphasizes either the RnB (blues/Ray Charles) aspect of rock or the country aspect of rock (honky-tonk, think of the kind of piano you'd hear in an old southern bar). And that's how the Stones incorporated the piano, by using it to give the music a grooving RnB quality, or an old-timey country feel.

Piano brings rock back to it's roots :)

Oh yeah, last of all . . . I'm starting to think anything can be used to rock out . . . any kind of instrument when it's played with the right "attitude." So much of making something rock out is bringing wildness and that devil-may-care attitude to it. I think it's easier in some ways to rock out on a guitar because the distortion and all of that makes things instantly sound rebellious. But if you're creative, you can make anything (almost anything?) sound rebellious!

Can you rock out on a harp? :)

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