If You Want To Experiment, Master The Basics

The best way to start? Simply.

A few years ago, my wife and I went to see Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch in theaters. While I’m not the biggest Anderson fan (Rushmore is a stone cold classic, but I find his later work to be too fussy) my wife likes him and we needed a night out. I don’t really recall what the movie was about. I think it was a series of vignettes and Timothée Chalamet played a socialist revolutionary? It doesn’t matter. What matters is the one scene that managed to burn itself into my memory. Here, art dealer Julian Cadazio (played by Adrien Brody) explains the nature of abstract art to a group of collectors.

“One way to tell if a modern artist actually knows what he’s doing is to get him to paint you a horse or a flower or a sinking battleship or something that’s actually supposed to look like the thing it’s supposed to look like. He could paint this beautifully if he wanted, but he thinks [the abstract painting] is better.”

In two sentences, Cadazio answers the question everyone has the first time they see a Jackson Pollock. “If I can do it, is it really art?” The answer is yes, but only if the artist has mastered the basics first. They must fully grasp the form before they can step outside of its boundaries.

I thought of this scene a few months ago when I went to see seminal emo-rock band Brand New perform at the UBS Arena out on Long Island. While most known for their 2003 breakout album Deja Entendu, Brand New has an extensive, genre-bending catalogue that runs all the way up to 2017’s Science Fiction. As they played their way through deep-cut favorites like “Out of Mana”, “Sink” and “You Won’t Know”, my mind drifted to the songs they weren’t playing, namely anything from 2001’s Your Favorite Weapon.

Your Favorite Weapon is the Platonic ideal of a Y2K-era emo album. It has driving guitars and drums, pointed lyrics about heartbreak, and insanely catchy melodies. Most bands from that era struggled to make anything half as good with their second or third albums. Brand New absolutely nailed it on their first try. A lot of this success can be attributed to lead singer Jesse Lacy, one of those uber-talented frontmen whose band is viewed less as a collection of musicians and more as an extension of their personal vision (à la Adam Granduciel of The War On Drugs), but every member plays their part perfectly here. Each note is precise and crisp. There are no skips or filler tracks, just 41 minutes of emo pop-punk perfection.

The rest of their albums, however, sound nothing like this one. Good luck finding those poppy “Do do do”s from “Failure By Design” anywhere else in their discography.

Deja Entendu comes the closest. It has the vague shape of an emo album, but its qualities are more dreamy and ethereal, best exemplified by the standout “Jaws Theme Swimming.” It exists in a transitory space between where they started and where they were going.

This pivot was completed with 2006’s The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me. I remember listening to it, on the day it was released, while driving home from college for Thanksgiving break. I didn’t like it at all. I found it to be too slow, boring, and inaccessible. The lead track “Sowing Season” left me wanting, as did what came after. Where were those big, booming melodies from the first two albums? It took a few months (and a gnarly breakup) for me to understand what they were going for and how great this record truly was. It’s now easily one of my top ten favorite albums of all time.

I say all of that to say this. I don’t think any of this growth would have been possible if Brand New hadn’t built such an impenetrable foundation with their first album. They mastered the basics of their genre right out of the gate. Only then, armed with impeccable fundamentals, were they able to branch out and create a sound that was wholly unique to them. They could have kept making the same type of record if they wanted to, but they thought this new experimental sound was better. And they were right. But those dense and challenging songs I was listening to at the UBS Arena could not have existed without the more straightforward tracks of Your Favorite Weapon preceding them.

This phenomenon isn’t only limited to music or painting. I’ve seen it in plenty of other art forms, including stand-up comedy. Many know about the origins of George Carlin and Richard Pryor, both doing squeaky clean, TV-ready comedy in the 1960s before evolving into the iconoclasts we’re now familiar with in the 1970s.

The transformations of Carlin and Pryor certainly had an outsized impact on the history of comedy, but there’s another comic who went through a similar transformation that had a great impact on me personally: Mike Birbiglia.

It was Thanksgiving weekend 2006 (I’m just now connecting the dots as I write this, but holy shit, Thanksgiving 2006 was an incredibly formative holiday in terms of my artistic tastes) and I was up watching Late Night With Conan O’Brien. Closing out the show was Birbiglia, a comedian I had never heard of. I loved stand-up at the time and certainly had my favorite comics, but I found most comedy to be unfunny and forgettable. However, what I saw from Birbiglia that night forced me to sit up in bed and pay attention.

The combination of the traditional late night “Tight Five” plus Birbiglia’s goofy and disarming personality immediately won me over. I thought, “I need to hear more from this guy.” The next morning (I’m showing my age here) I drove to my local Best Buy and bought his debut stand-up album Two Drink Mike.

(Quick aside - That voice you hear introducing Birbiglia at the beginning of the album? That’s a fresh-out-of-college John Mulaney)

Two Drink Mike was the perfect extension of Birbiglia’s Conan set. His voice was fully formed, and he utilized it to deliver hard punchlines that both generated laughs and revealed who he was as a person. At the end of that album, you completely understood his point of view and wanted to go along for the ride because it was so damn funny and enjoyable. Like Brand New, Birbiglia mastered the basics on his first try.

And like Brand New, Birbiglia could have kept doing more of the same. Instead, he decided to experiment. Rather than deliver more straight ahead stand-up specials, he branched out into the world of storytelling and one-man shows. Now, the knock on one-man shows is that they’re boring and overly sentimental, essentially stand-up comedy without the jokes. But because Birbiglia’s comedy fundamentals were so strong, he resisted falling into this trap.

His first one-man show, Sleepwalk With Me, was about his REM behavior disorder. Here Birbiglia deftly weaves together stories about his sleepwalking and how it has impacted his life, but he remembers to be funny first and foremost. There’s always a punchline lurking around the corner. Because of this, your attention never flags, and that in turn makes you more invested in the stories he’s telling. It’s a victory on two levels.

In the years since Sleepwalk With Me’s 2009 debut, Birbiglia has put on numerous one-man shows, each anchored around a very specific topic: monogamy, children, death, the meaning of life, etc. He’s been incredibly successful in this space. But even now it feels wrong to simply call his performances “one-man shows.” They’re so funny and joke forward, it feels more accurate to call them something like “stand-up deep dives.” Rather than bounce from topic to topic like a normal stand-up special, Birbiglia focuses on one major theme and attacks it from every conceivable angle while relating it to experiences from his own life. It’s incredibly powerful. But, again, none of it would be possible if he hadn’t mastered the form with Two Drink Mike. Once he did that, he could begin to strike out and experiment, using his superior joke writing ability to build something truly unique.

Analyzing Birbiglia’s path makes me reflect on my own failed stand-up comedy career and all of the different places where I went wrong. I think one reason I never made it in comedy (among many others) is that I never truly mastered the basics the way I was supposed to. I wanted to be like Louis CK right out of the box, complete with deep, personal revelations and esoteric digressions. The standard setup/punchline mechanics felt boring and constraining to me. Only now do I realize how important they actually are, and how much I lost by not starting with and mastering them.

If you’re an aspiring artist, don’t build your castles on quicksand. It’s tempting to try and strike out on your own, working to immediately separate yourself from your peers, both in terms of style and career growth. But this is a fool’s errand. Only through the steady, boring work of building your fundamentals can you even begin to consider experimentation. It won’t be glamorous or fun or cool. But if you take your time and get the little things right, it will be worth it. All you have to do is look at the greats. If it worked for them, it can work for you too.