the timboucher experience

Last weekend I found myself at a wonderful party north of New York City wherein we spent most of the night getting hammered and singing songs as a group over the dinner table and a campfire. There were about fifty or sixty of us, give or take. And one roast pig. Aside from being tremendously fun, the whole thing re-opened my eyes to what the importance of music to the cohesion of social groups can really be. Singing songs together publicly, people lifting up their voices as one has an extremely powerful effect. It washes away differences in background and lifestyle and unites people in what can be a very moving way.

Coming back to my “ordinary” life in Baltimore, MD I got to thinking about how the ritual I’d just experienced was lacking in my day-to-day life. I sit down every day to write and play songs by myself, but only occasionally does anybody else get involved, and only even more occasionally do I end up in a location where a bunch of people are singing together as a unit.

So I outlined the following YouTube project which I’d like to share with you now. Like everything on my site, this project idea is open-source and formally in the Public Domain, so that means you can take it and run with it and not feel like you’re ripping me off or something. Go out and have fun is my only direction.

I originally envisioned this as a YouTube project, but I can see it becoming a lot more than that. What I was going to do was make up a username, something like “FolkInBaltimore” - something which gives an indication of music, community and place. Then, I was going to go around and draft basically every single person I could find who had an acoustic guitar, could strum a few chords and was willing to sing on a street-corner for all of five minutes, film them and put it on the internet. Each person would have to identify the location of where they were playing outside in public, and then I would go through and create a user map on Google Maps, and connect the videos together into a geographic historical monument to a moment in time when people got together and did something musical.

That’s the nucleus of the idea, anyway. From there, you could take it in a lot of different directions. When you are out with your little group trying to film somebody playing on a street corner, you could invite passersby to get in on the action and try to sing along. You could also bring out a small crew of people to “incite” public singing and to act as a back-up chorus for the person being video-taped. Having a group already intact is more likely to draw in passersby to the action.

You also don’t necessarily need to videotape it to make the same things happen in real life, but I figured it would be more fun and a more effective way to spread that meme to other non-local zones. The thing that a video camera does in the public eye is that it makes whatever you are doing into a spectacle. It makes it into a ritual. It says we are doing something worth looking at and worth remembering. Come and remember it with us, or at least pass by and gawk, if nothing else.

On top of that, such a project would be an exceptional way to meet all the musicians in your city, and to inspire them towards a common purpose: bringing music out directly into the community instead of playing at bars, clubs or wherever else we tend to hide these things away. One of the only really public venues music really has nowadays is in shopping malls, and that’s just on the radio and is designed to get people to buy more useless junk. What if hundreds of people in your city suddenly started singing together on a regular or random basis at the top of their lungs? What kind of effect would this have on your community?

From here, you could also easily organize a musical showcase: top talent, or people with the most interest at least could be brought together at a later date to meet one another and hear each other’s songs and to sing along. Hopefully, people could even learn one another’s tunes from their YouTube videos and the party would grow and grow in a very organic way.

Anyway, I don’t have a camera and its beginning to get a bit cold to be outside playing a bunch of music with strangers, but I aim to begin this project sometime in the next few months. I happily encourage other people to play with these concepts and practices and to document your results on the internet - and definitely keep me posted! Cheers!

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