July 14, 2019 – As I study the guitar, my YouTube suggestions are tending more to guitar tutorials. I got a nice one with a young girl covering Panama. I like them when they are girls, for obvious reasons. All of the comments, or at least most of them, were about … well, let’s call it the girl, not her playing just the girl. Sure, the girl is channeling her inner Nita Strauss with her outfit, but I give her credit. Then there’s everything else I keep running into. Perhaps it’s related.

Taylor Swift is losing it over Scooter Braun, the business force behind Justin Bieber, buying her former label Big Machine Records. It seems Taylor wanted to buy it, just to get her old country music catalog, but Scooter beat her to it. Or he paid more. Or something. Anyway, she really hates him. She talks a lot about song writing, about her own song writing, and somehow this is coming up all over my YouTube feed. I predict she finds a way to buy her catalog.

Then there’s Billie Eilish. I get videos about her outfits. I get videos about her concerts. I get people talking about her concerts. And every station I listen to from pop to alternative talked about her string of three sold-out concerts in L.A. last week. Oh and she remade the song Bad Guy with her crush Justin Bieber. The song is awful, so I won’t post it. Her concerts though, it’s truly crazy how loud the girls are singing (and it is mostly girls). You can’t hear Billie at all. I don’t understand the point of that. The one cute thing is that she plays with her brother. I don’t know why I like that, but I do. I found myself wondering what goes through Billie Eilish’s mind at her concerts. Does she like the mania of all the girls singing so loudly she doesn’t even need to sing? What’s the internal mental reaction of anyone, any artist, any singer, in that place on stage with the entire audience singing every word? I guess my answer is in the Taylor Swift video. She says it’s the best feeling in the world to hear her audience singing the words. But that loudly?

Which brings me to my point, and my point this week is a question. Is it possible to have mania, the kind of mania that Billie Eilish brings, or even that Taylor Swift brings, if you’re a guitar player, not a singer? And I’m not talking about comments about what one looks like, but the actual playing? I don’t know….