"There are nights when you can feel stale because you've fallen into a pattern by touring too much, but it's easy to get out of it by deliberately getting in trouble and playing yourself into a corner to then see if you can get out of it"
About this Quote
Touring turns even the wildest music into shift work, and Leo Kottke is blunt about the hangover: repetition doesn’t just dull the audience, it dulls the performer from the inside. “Stale” here isn’t a minor off-night; it’s the creeping sense that muscle memory has replaced attention. For a guitarist famous for precision and oddball tunings, that’s basically an artistic emergency.
The fix he proposes is tellingly mischievous: “deliberately getting in trouble.” He’s not romanticizing chaos for its own sake; he’s describing a craft strategy. The “trouble” is technical and structural: choose risk, invite the possibility of failure, sabotage the autopilot. “Playing yourself into a corner” is stagecraft as self-imposed constraint, like changing the rules mid-game so you can’t rely on your usual moves. It’s the live version of writing with a limitation: you narrow the exits so invention becomes the only way out.
Subtext: artistry isn’t maintained by comfort, it’s maintained by productive discomfort. Kottke’s ethos pushes back against the consumer expectation that a touring musician should reproduce the record flawlessly, night after night. He’s arguing for performance as a living process, not a product. The corner is where presence returns: you have to listen harder, react faster, and commit publicly. That’s also why the line carries a quiet swagger. He trusts the years of technique enough to risk wrecking the moment, because the point isn’t avoiding mistakes; it’s reintroducing stakes.
The fix he proposes is tellingly mischievous: “deliberately getting in trouble.” He’s not romanticizing chaos for its own sake; he’s describing a craft strategy. The “trouble” is technical and structural: choose risk, invite the possibility of failure, sabotage the autopilot. “Playing yourself into a corner” is stagecraft as self-imposed constraint, like changing the rules mid-game so you can’t rely on your usual moves. It’s the live version of writing with a limitation: you narrow the exits so invention becomes the only way out.
Subtext: artistry isn’t maintained by comfort, it’s maintained by productive discomfort. Kottke’s ethos pushes back against the consumer expectation that a touring musician should reproduce the record flawlessly, night after night. He’s arguing for performance as a living process, not a product. The corner is where presence returns: you have to listen harder, react faster, and commit publicly. That’s also why the line carries a quiet swagger. He trusts the years of technique enough to risk wrecking the moment, because the point isn’t avoiding mistakes; it’s reintroducing stakes.
Quote Details
| Topic | Reinvention |
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