Show notes
For this podcast series I have roughly three conditions:
1. I must love the guest’s music.
2. The guest must excel at guitar.
3. I must be able to speak with the guest face-to-face.
How important the last condition is, I realized during my interview with Paul Masvidal, the guitarist, singer, and composer of Cynic. With this band, Paul created the groundbreaking album Focus, where he masterfully blurred the lines between jazz, metal, and psychedelic rock as if they had never existed.
While preparing for the interview with Paul, I searched for an old digital file. Years ago – 18 years to be precise – I had spoken to him once before, over the phone. What has always stuck with me from that conversation is that we talked about his work as a music therapist. Paul supported people in the last phase of their lives while doing that work.
Amazingly, I managed to find the audio file of that interview. As a nice bonus, I also found old interviews I had done with, for example, Steve Vai, Joe Satriani, Dweezil Zappa, and Tommy Emmanuel. I felt a bit ashamed when I listened to the file. The Niels from 18 years ago didn’t really listen well, I noticed. I asked a lot of questions, very quickly, one after the other. This may have had to do with a lack of experience. But what undoubtedly also played a role was that I wasn’t in the same room as Paul during that interview. I couldn’t read his body language, couldn’t sense why he needed certain silences—in short, I couldn’t feel his energy.
I think listening to that rather awkward interview made me a bit tense at the beginning of the new conversation with Paul. It got off to a slightly rocky start, partly due to a tour manager who casually walked in after fifteen minutes of recording to say there was no more time for a longer conversation. Turned out to be a mistake. The tourmanager probably still had his watch set to the wrong time zone. Anyway, after that intermezzo, the ice melted. Paul spoke very openly about how playing guitar was not just a fun activity for him, but a bitter necessity: an escape from a violent environment, a positive anchor, an “act of survival,” as he called it.
Death was also frequently discussed. Paul said he became a music therapist out of fear of death. At that time, he had lost many friends from the gay community to AIDS, so death was always looming. “I had to get close to death to cope with that fear.”
We also talked about the deaths of two of Paul’s old bandmates, both in 2020. Paul had a unresolved conflict with one of them, which he found very difficult to handle. “Instead of resolving this conflict together, I had to do it alone,” Paul said.
I am very grateful to Paul for sharing so openly and beautifully in this episode. We parted with a firm hug. Another good reason to choose a face-to-face conversation instead of a telephone or online interview. While editing this episode, I read that Paul lost his father last week. Once again, death makes an appearance around this episode. Unfortunately, I can’t give him a real hug this time, so it remains a virtual one...Be strong Paul!
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