What the Talking Is For

A man walks to the microphone with a guitar. He does not play. He does not strum a chord to check the tune. He tells a story about a friend in San Antonio who fixed motorcycles and could not tell a lie. The story takes ninety seconds. Then he plays a song, and the song is about something else entirely, and somehow the story has already opened the door.

Guy Clark did this hundreds of times. So did the people around him — Townes Van Zandt, Rodney Crowell, Steve Earle, Nanci Griffith. They came out of a Texas tradition where the talking between songs was not a break from the performance. It was the performance, in a lower register. The songs were the peaks. The talk was the trail up.

Most performers treat the space between songs as an obstacle. They fill it with a beat count, a tune-up, a thank-you that means nothing. They apologize for equipment. They ask if the sound is okay. They read the setlist. Every one of these is a small forfeit — the audience feels it even when they cannot name it. Attention that was gathered by the last song gets returned, coin by coin, until the next song has to buy it back.

The best performers understand that the audience is not waiting for the next song. The audience is in a room with you. The room does not pause between songs. It keeps breathing. Whatever you do in that breath is part of the show, because the audience has no way to turn you off. They will find something to think about, and if you do not guide it, they will think about their feet or their phones or the price of the drink.

So the story is not a stall. The story is a hand held out. It says: I know this song is coming; I know you know it too; and before we go there, let me put us both somewhere else for a minute, so that when we arrive, we arrive together. This is why the great in-between talkers were never funny by accident. They were funny with intention. They set a tempo of attention the song could then ride.

You can hear the difference on a live record. Prine tells a joke and then sings something that lands like a knife because the joke lowered your defenses. Cohen introduces a song with a mumble about a hotel he could not finish it in, and by the time the first chord comes you are already halfway inside. Springsteen turns a story about his father into a runway. The song lifts because the runway was long enough.

There is a temptation, if you have not done this before, to over-prepare the patter. To write it out, to memorize it. Do not. Prepare the truth of it. Know what the song is about. Know one true thing you feel about that. Say the true thing in whatever words find you on that night. The audience can smell a rehearsed monologue the same way they can smell a rehearsed encore. What you want is the sound of a person remembering something out loud, not the sound of a person delivering something.

Silence is also allowed. A long pause after a heavy song, where you just stand there and let the room settle, is worth ten introductions. The point is not to fill the space. The point is to inhabit it.

The songs are what people came for. The talking is what makes them stay.