The Stage Performance Playbook

What is performance? Why do we go on stage? Why do we need to do that or want to do that? This is going to be a very fun section.

How did this all begin? How did we get to a place where we wanted to perform and what is a performance? I've troubled over this as I thought about where I should go and, and the fact is that I just gotta go to the beginning. Are you ready?

You were born, you appeared on the planet. There you were a little baby, brand new life, and you were so beautiful. You were so loved and then you turn 1, 2, 3 years old... now you start to become aware of a world around you, other people in that world, siblings, brothers and sisters and then you start getting a little older 4, 5, 6 years old and they ask the question "what would you like to be?" Oh, I'd like to be a fire person, a safety personnel, a nurse, a doctor, a lawyer, a mechanic, a astronaut, an airline pilot, and then you start taking in the world around.

Soon you realize you're going to have to leave the vertical integration of your family, people who were biologically predisposed to love you and move to the horizontal integration of your peer group, people who are not under that same constraint. what are you going to do that allows you to transition from your family and their unconditional love to your peer group who are only letting you in because of the service you might provide?

All of this is getting so good because now you looked around and you thought to yourself, "How am I going to be of service to my peers so I can be included in included in with the people I'm going to live with, I'm going to work with, I'm going to be friends with, I'm going to struggle with, I'm going to marry and mate with?"

So now you've looked around and you saw these things you might do, but you saw something very particular, you saw how creators were treated.

Airline pilots are treated well, doctors are treated well, but nobody's treated better than creators. Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Beyonce, Carol King, the list goes...and you thought to yourself maybe I could be my peers creator, maybe I could make things that are so compelling and beautiful that I will be of service to them and they will allow me to be one of their creators and I will live in that very special place reserved for creators.

It's a great idea, a good job choice, you can do this. That's what this video is all about. So how do we create and then deliver it? because there's competition for that. How are we going to deliver our creativity in a way that will be compelling to our peers? We can do this! And if you think it's going to be fun, you have no idea. I've lived my life as a creator and it has been as magical and wonderful as you ever thought it was.

What is, what is a performance? It's a funny question because when people think about performance they think about how it's sort of something that's being done to an audience, that an audience comes in and I sort of spew all my noise all over them and they either like it or don't like it but it's not like that at all.

A performance is a conversation. It's an exchange of intimacies. The question should be, how do you express and exchange intimacies safely?

There are some tools that I use to do that. Different people might use a different instrument, speakers will use their voice, but I use my guitar.

What I can now express with my guitar is a sadness and an intimacy that if I expressed it without chords, without melody, without the predictability of rhythm and tonality, the passion of it would overwhelm? What our music does is represent the discipline that allows us to safely express our passion.

They will not accept your passion until you have proven your discipline. This is why we practice.

Livingston performs "I Belong" at Side Door at The Palladium.

Imagine once you get the discipline of chords, of time, of melody, and of lyric, the intimacy that can go back and forth. Sometimes I'll do a show and I'll be playing and I'll look at a table and see someone crying, I'll look at 'em and I'll ask, "does that song make you cry?" to which I will respond "yeah, it makes me cry too." How beautiful is it to share that with somebody?

Imagine how beautiful it is to have had a song that's been on the radio in such widespread acceptance that you get to play a concert at the Boch Center to 3,500 filled seats. You play the opening chord of your hit record and the audience erupts! I've seen people play their hit records and listen to the whole place, explode, I have gone on stage and played the opening chords of a song that had been on the radio a lot and listened to the audience erupt.

This is such a good feeling and the reason why they're so enthusiastic is that they know the song, they know all the words, they can sing along!

So what you've done is you've made your audience and then if, you're doing your job well, you turn them in to great singers! You play them songs that when they sing they sound great singing them. You sing musical ideas and thoughts that are so personal and so intimate that when the audience hears them, they cry like babies!

What a beautiful thing to do for a living. And your thought was, The reason why we are together right now is you thought maybe, just maybe I can do this. Maybe I have what it takes. I'm so excited for your adventure. Glad to be a part of it. And we'll start in on the minutiae right now.

Livingston performs "My Show Theme Song" at Side Door at The Palladium.