Quench Convos - Episode 4 with Kevin Griffin
Quench Convos Episode 4 with Kevin Griffin.
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A Quench Convos playlist.
There comes a point in almost every creative pursuit where adding more doesn't make it any better.
The temptation is always there.
One more ingredient.
One more line.
One more tasting note.
One more feature.
One more flourish.
As someone who spends an unhealthy amount of time thinking about design, it's something I wrestle with constantly. When is a product finished? When have we said enough? When is this just an ego play? When does another idea stop making something better?
I've come to realise the same questions apply to music. Not the songs themselves. The performances. The ones I keep coming back to all have something in common.
Purity.
They trust the story.
It's a funny thing. The older I get, the less interested I become in technical perfection and the more I'm drawn to authenticity. I'd rather hear a voice crack with emotion than hit every note perfectly. I'd rather hear a musician laugh at themselves than execute another flawless solo. Humanity.
Maybe that's why I keep returning to these performances. They're all examples of masters knowing exactly what to leave out.
This is the performance that started the whole thought.
I'd heard Growin' Up before plenty of times before. Always a banger. Then someone sent me the Roxy version and said, "Wait until he stops singing." What a sentence. Wait until he stops singing. About two minutes in, Bruce walks away from the melody altogether.
The band keeps gently rolling beneath him while he launches into a story about growing up, his dad, his guitar, expectations and wanting something bigger than the life everyone else imagined for him.
Is every detail true?
Probably not.
Is every emotion true?
Absolutely.
By the time the band crashes back into the chorus, you're not hearing the same song anymore.
You've just spent ten minutes inside Bruce Springsteen's head.
It's theatre.
It's stand-up.
It's storytelling.
It's rock and roll.
More importantly, it's confidence.
Only someone completely comfortable in their craft would interrupt their own song for ten minutes because they know the audience will come with them. Isn't that magic?
Listen here:
Bruce tells stories between the songs. Paul Simon hides them inside the songs. I've always admired writers who leave space for the audience. Who trust us enough to do some of the work ourselves.
The Boxer has always felt like that.
You can spend forty years listening to it and still find another line that means something different. A great song will evolve with you. The Central Park performance is my favourite because his voice has aged. The years have caught up with him. He's human. Strangely, that's exactly what makes the song better. The older Paul Simon sounds like someone who's actually lived every word.
Sometimes time is the final instrument.
Listen here:
Then there's Tracy Chapman who proves you don't have to say much at all. No long introduction. No speech. No theatrics.
She simply begins.
Within thirty seconds you're sitting in the passenger seat. You know the streets. You know the shift work. You know the feeling of believing that one car might somehow change your life. The remarkable thing is how little she asks of her own voice. There's no showing off. No vocal gymnastics.
Just enough.
Which, now that I think about it, is exactly why it works.
Listen here:
I've always thought people underestimate Tupac as a writer. Even a poet.
They'll talk about hip-hop.
About influence.
About culture.
All true.
But listen carefully to Dear Mama. Strip away everything else. What's left?
A son thanking his mum.
That's it. No complicated metaphor. No clever twist. Just honesty. That purity I keep coming back to.
Sometimes the simplest stories are the hardest ones to tell. Especially effectively. Words that make you feel something.
Listen here:
Yes, yes Taylor Swift is on this list but hear me out. Taylor Swift understands something that every writer eventually learns.
Big emotions are remembered through tiny details.
Not heartbreak.
The scarf.
Not nostalgia.
The refrigerator light.
Not love.
Dancing around the kitchen.
That's why her songs work. She doesn't tell you what happened. She lets you discover it through the details. It's the literary equivalent of good product design.
Nothing unnecessary survives (albeit this track is 10 minutes long ;)
Listen here:
"A bottle of red... a bottle of white..."
It might be my favourite opening line in popular music. Not because it's clever. Because within five words Billy Joel has taken me somewhere. I'm sitting around a table. There's a bottle of wine that's somehow lasted all afternoon. Someone's halfway through a story they've probably told before. Nobody minds and that's the point.
Billy Joel had an extraordinary ability to write places, not just songs. His characters don't feel invented—they feel like people you've met. Brenda and Eddie could have lived on your street. The Italian restaurant could be the local you've been going to for years.
This Carnegie Hall performance is the one I keep coming back to. So have 4.8 million other people at the time of writing this too.
There's an excitement to it that later performances don't quite have but that's just a time stamp. Billy sounds like someone who knows he's onto something special, but hasn't yet become Billy Joel the institution.
It feels hungry.
Young.
Full of possibility.
And perhaps that's why I love it.
Because, like Bruce at The Roxy, it reminds us that great performances aren't built on perfection.
They're built on belief.
Listen here:
The longer I spend around good flavour makers in their respective fields, the more I notice they all arrive at the same place.
Not more.
Less.
The confidence to leave things out.
To leave silence between the notes.
To trust that not every thought needs explaining.
That not every corner needs filling.
That not every product needs another feature.
Maybe that's why these performances stay with me.
Bruce leaves out the performance.
Paul leaves out the explanation.
Tracy leaves out the theatrics.
Tupac leaves out the ego.
Taylor leaves out everything except the details that matter.
Billy leaves out everything except the story.
And somehow, in removing all that noise...
...they leave us with something much bigger.
Maybe that's what craftsmanship really is.
Not adding.
Knowing what to leave out.
Quench Convos Episode 4 with Kevin Griffin.
Quench Convos Episode 3 with Alejandro Saravia.
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