Sunday, April 22
I've been in studios where a musician, for instance, would play a rhythm guitar part. He'd say, "I've got an idea for a part," and at that moment he was excited about it. He would play it, and it would have all sorts of imperfections; he would suddenly think of a variation on it halfway through that was a little bit better. So having heard that back, he'd say, "Yeah, that variation is good. I'll do that all the way through." So he'd go out and do it again.
As far as you could tell, his playing was identical. But something was lost there, and it's not something one just suspects. I'm sure it's true. Something has been lost. There's a kind of tension, even down to microscopic things like the tentativeness or certainty with which he hits a string. I'm sure that makes an acoustic difference to what happens. So I'm more and more preferring to move into a position of fooling myself, in a way, that what I'm doing is not a retractable statement.
— Brian Eno
