(Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher & Higher

Chasing the White Whale

Call me Professor.

I started working on Jackie Wilson’s “(Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher & Higher” in late April, not long after buying my Mini Precision Bass.

At first, nothing about the bass line looked particularly frightening.

It isn’t filled with complicated runs. There isn’t some impossible section waiting in the middle. The pattern makes sense.

Then I tried to play it at full speed.

I couldn’t.

Not very well, anyway.

The notes were there. My fingers just weren’t getting to them quickly enough.

So I slowed the song down.

And that’s where this story really started.

A Little Faster

At a reduced tempo, everything fell into place.

I could hear the part. I could play the part. I understood how it was supposed to sit against the rest of the song.

Now I just had to speed it up.

A little at a time, I did.

That became part of my practice for months. Play it slowly. Get comfortable. Move the tempo up. Find the point where it started falling apart. Work there for a while.

Then come back another day and do it again.

Gradually, something changed.

The song stopped feeling impossibly fast.

Then it stopped feeling impossible at all.

I was getting there.

And that's when things got weird.

The Whale Appears

Somewhere along the way, I became intimidated by the song.

I’m not sure exactly when it happened.

Early on, there was nothing complicated about the problem. I couldn't play “Higher & Higher” fast enough, so I was practicing until I could.

Simple.

But after working on it for weeks—and then months—the eventual recording started to feel increasingly important.

I had put a lot of time into this thing.

Surely the finished version needed to be good.

Really good.

So I'd play it.

Better.

But not quite.

I'd work on something else for a while and come back.

Better again.

Still not quite.

Meanwhile, I recorded other songs. “Higher & Higher” stayed right where it was.

Unfinished.

At some point I had to admit something uncomfortable:

I could play the song now.

That wasn't really the problem anymore.

I had spent so long trying to get ready to record it that I had turned the recording itself into something to be afraid of.

There was always another rough edge to smooth out. Another place where the pocket could be a little better. Another reason to wait.

The song had become much larger in my head than it had any right to be.

My white whale.

Last Weekend

Then last weekend I played it again.

No breakthrough.

No sudden discovery that the song had become easy.

I just played it.

And when I finished, instead of thinking about what still needed work, I thought:

Today.

Today I’m recording this thing.

So I did.

I worked on it until I had a version I felt comfortable with.

Then I listened back.

There were imperfections.

Of course there were.

I know where they are. I know what I'd like to play better next time. Five months with a song gives you plenty of time to learn exactly where you'd like another shot.

But there was something else in the recording too.

The song.

Not the slowed-down version.

Not the practice version.

Not the version I hoped I'd eventually be able to play.

The actual song, at tempo, played by me.

And this time, that was enough.

Imperfect, but Complete

That may be the strangest part of this whole experience.

When I started working on “Higher & Higher,” I had a very clear problem:

I couldn't keep up.

Months later, I'd solved that problem and somehow replaced it with a harder one:

When is this good enough?

There isn't a tempo control for that.

I could keep working on this recording.

I could almost certainly make parts of it better.

But I don't think that's what this song needs from me anymore.

It needed me to finish it.

So that's what I did.

Nearly six months after slowing it down because my fingers couldn't keep up, I finally have a recording I'm comfortable putting out into the world.

It's imperfect.

It's complete.

And after spending most of the summer chasing my white whale, I'm finally ready to let it swim away.