I do have an ulterior motive. I was very fired up from having spoken to Thomas Pridgen yesterday.
I hope to share that with you soon, though I’ll have to edit it myself in order to release it in September.
In any case, Thomas is a man of many opinions, and he gives no quarter to inauthenticity, or basically anything less than expressing yourself completely on the drums. What’s more, when I asked him if he’s ever had “stage fright”, or been nervous performing in public, it’s literally never entered his mind.
Thomas is a combination of zero desire to impress anyone external to himself and (possibly projection, but he basically said as much) a rage-fueled desire to be great at drums. I’ve made videos on this paradox before. The latter fuels his superhuman practice regimen; the former his total absence of self-consciousness behind the kit.
All of this culminated yesterday afternoon when, with a video void to fill since my editor is on a well-deserved vacation (8020 is just his side gig; he has a full time job for a TV station), I decided to sit down and shoot two videos of drum improvisation.
Both are one-take, first-take, and uncut. Luckily for the performances, some of the Thomas Pridgen “devil-may-care” ethos had rubbed off, because, good-or-bad, I was able to reach that equivocal state. And lucky for my calendar and rusty editing chops, where wasn’t much to edit.
Hope you enjoy!