Been thinking. These days with mass choirs with three keyboards, two guitars, a bass, drums and canned excitement, gospel music seems to me to be crammed to the gills with notes and voices. Much of Rock and Roll and popular music feels the same to me. It's as if there was a sense that if you record on a 32 track machine, you have to use all 32 tracks. Most folk music and country seems to avoid falling in to that trap. At least up until now. I think that what always brings me back to folk music, early rhythm and blues (with groups often accompanied only by a piano and drums) the old black gospel and jazz is that there is enough space for me to savor the interplay of voices and instruments. Recording equipment may have 32 tracks, but I don't think my head has more than five or six. Any more than that, and my head starts to reel.

As in painting, and literature, furniture design (think Shaker furniture) and drama, it's the space that focuses our minds on what is being expressed. It can be the nuance of a silent glance in a movie or just a sustained chord of a vocal group that says far more to me than an exploding 18 wheeler plummeting off the side of the George Washington Bridge, or 100 voices shouting Glory!

Anyone else feel this way?

Jerry