Michael Holt at Sam & Karlien's house concert (Rotselaar, Belgium).
A concert with Michael Holt is something to behold. The soft-spoken singer-songwriter only plays in people’s homes. He likes to set up the room himself to facilitate the audience paying close attention. He doesn’t amplify his voice, and prefers to play a real piano or acoustic guitar. He doesn’t plan what he’s going to perform. He’s as likely to play a classical piece as a folk-pop tune. And if it’s time to take a break to have a conversation, that’s just fine. You can purchase a CD or a download of his music, but there’s no pressure. Holt is living in the moment, and his way of presenting music intentionally reflects a life philosophy he’s been developing over decades.
After many years of living and working out of Toronto, Holt is currently based in Massachusetts. He travels the world performing in peoples’ homes, and is also interviewing people for his Rehumanize Music podcast. He is working on a book titled Eating Music: Ten Ways Back to One of Life’s Most Nourishing Pleasures. In it, he outlines practices for restoring a positive relationship with music. The first principle, “Eat Music,” reads “Music is spiritual food, so let yourself partake of its pleasures.” Holt applies some of the principles of the Slow Food movement to his theories on music.
Holt is presenting an Eating Music workshop at Threshold (2717 Atwood Ave.) on June 4.
Isthmus talked with Holt about his unusual music career, his workshops, and his belief that a better relationship with music is possible.
How did you come to the decision that house concerts are the best way to present your music?
I started by playing in clubs, the way most people in pop and rock do, and did that through the ’90s with my band, The Mommyheads. We did a lot of touring, and played in Madison many times and played all over the country, all over North America. I enjoyed doing that, but when I started doing my own music and started a solo career, I found that I really didn’t like playing in clubs.
Why was that?I was looking for a more intimate connection with my audience, and I really wanted to communicate with them and to make a direct connection with what I had to say. As a solo artist I was quieter and couldn’t compete with the overstimulating environment of a rock club — people coming and going, a lot of commerce going on, drinks being ordered, neon signs flashing. I just felt I was out of place in that environment.
So eventually I discovered house concerts, and I fell in love with them immediately. It was really night and day for me. Playing in someone’s house for a much smaller group of people but having a much more meaningful connection with them. So that was where my music and my solo career started to feel like this is the right thing for me. So I then started organizing house concerts myself for other people to play at. I became an organizer of them and I started some festivals of house concerts in Toronto, where I was living pretty much the last 18 years, until just recently.
Your concerts are different than most concerts. They’re completely unscripted. You are reacting in the moment and deciding what song to share. And there’s often a storytelling element as well.
I could play a song that’s about climate change and then we end up talking about climate change for quite some time. Or we’re just talking and an issue comes up, a conversation veers in a different direction, and I’m like, “Oh, I have a song about that.” So music and the conversation are really kind of evolving together in my shows — that’s kind of organic. It works really well in house concerts. And that is really only possible, in a way, with live music. Because recorded music, you can’t have a conversation with the artist that you’re listening to on your phone and have them change their mind about what song they’re going to play because of the thing you just said.
And the events expanded beyond music, right?
We mixed it up with theater, with poetry, with film — always food and conversation, trying to recreate the idea of salons in Europe at the turn of the century. People would talk about the culture or the music that they were seeing, but also about what’s going on in their lives, what’s going on in town, what’s going on in society. Can art help break the ice for meaningful conversations about the things we really need to get together and talk about together and face together? I coined the word “house culture” to talk about all of this. My definition is taking things that we normally do online or in commercial venues, or alone, and instead doing them together, face to face and at each other’s homes.
What did you learn from those experiences?
I basically stepped outside of the whole conventional path that many musicians take and I just went much more directly to people. And I found that it was just so much better in so many ways. Music, like so many other things in our society, has been kind of taken away from people by corporations and by other aspects of mainstream culture. As a result it’s become less responsive to people, less directly meaningful to people, less participatory, less community-oriented.
How would you describe your book in progress?
My book is about how can we repair the shattered nature of our society and our relationship with music. There’s so many ways in which I see us living in a shattered society, categorized by separation. It’s easy to romanticize the past, but also if we have a fantasy about the way things were in the past, whether it’s true or not, that fantasy can still be a guiding light for how we want things to be.
What do you hope will come out of this exploration?
So I have this fantasy that in the past, let’s say in tribal societies, music was something that everybody did together. They shared it, it was part of life, part of everyday life, and dancing, for example, was something that everybody participated in — it was part and parcel with community and community life. Now music is this commodity that we buy or we subscribe to, and we get it on our phones in the tiny little speakers where we don’t even hear the full sound. And how can that bring people together the way a dance around a fire in a tribal situation did? My book is how can we use music today, within a modern context, to come back to a more deep, meaningful community-oriented experience?
To register for the Eating Music workshop, email Michael Holt at pianotroubadour@gmail.com.
