the song that only works when you play it wrong
there's a song i've been playing for three years that i've never played correctly. i know what the correct version sounds like — i've heard the original, i know the chords, i know the tempo. but every time i play it i play it wrong. slower than it should be. different chord voicings. sometimes i change the melody without meaning to.
and it's better. the wrong version is better. not better than the original — different. it's become something else through the wrongness.
what wrong means
wrong here means: not what was written. not what was intended. not what the composer had in mind. but also: not what i had in mind when i started playing it. the wrongness isn't deliberate. it's what happens when i'm not paying close enough attention to the correct version and my hands go somewhere else.
that somewhere else is interesting. it's where my hands go when they're not being told where to go. it's a kind of automatic writing for music — the thing that comes out when you stop trying to produce the thing you're supposed to produce.
i've been thinking about this in the context of covers. the best covers i've heard are the ones that play the song wrong in a specific way — wrong enough that you hear something new, not so wrong that you lose the original. the End of 8 approach to loops is similar: you start with something and let it become something else through the process of working with it.
the permission to be wrong
the problem with playing correctly is that it requires you to know what correct is and to monitor yourself against it. that monitoring takes attention. attention that could be going toward feeling the song, toward listening to what's happening, toward being present in the playing.
when you give yourself permission to be wrong — or when you're wrong without giving yourself permission, which is what usually happens — that monitoring stops. and something else starts. something that's harder to describe but easier to hear.
over at Calitoy there's been some writing about the version of the project that only exists in your head — the gap between what you imagined and what you made. the wrong version of a song is a version of that gap. it's what happens when the imagined version meets the actual hands, the actual moment, the actual feeling.
the song that became mine
i don't play the original anymore. i play my wrong version. it's not a cover — it's something else. it has the structure of the original but the feeling of something i made. i'm not sure what to call that.
the Wicked Youth community has been writing about the songs that defined specific years — the ones that became yours even though they weren't. that's the same thing. a song becomes yours through the wrongness of how you hear it, how you remember it, how you play it back to yourself.
the Jeremy Dean Music blog has been tracking some of this — the relationship between playing and listening, between the song as written and the song as experienced. the wrong version is the experienced version. it's the one that matters.
play it wrong. see what it becomes.