It's time for your daily / bi-daily local music update.

I talked to Casey Trela, the frontman and principle songwriter for Sweater Weather (in my opinion, the best band in Chapel Hll), recently. One thing we talked about was his philosophy of performance, which, as mentioned on the band’s website, involves breaking down the barrier between artist and audience.

It seems ridiculous not to do so, according to Trela’s philosophy, because the relationship between who is making music and who is hearing music is from the start inherently intimate. “In most relationships,” he says, “when you meet someone new, you don’t start off by saying hey I just broke up with my girlfriend and I want to kill myself and I hate everything.”

But, as Trela points out, the dynamic between artist and audience is not like most relationships, and “not to acknowledge that relationship or that you are entering into that deeper relationship or that you have a responsibility for that relationship is kind of silly.”

Perhaps because of this mindset, or perhaps because of the intimacy of indie-rock, Trela feels awkward participating in the power dynamic of the stage – the dynamic embraced by Taking Back Sunday in the song Timberwolves at New Jersey: “I’ve got the mic and you’ve got the most pit.”

“When you’re on stage and everyone’s looking at you and you’re louder than them because you’re amplified, it’s really easy to think you should be. I enjoy entertaining and playing music but it doesn’t make me any better than the people I’m playing music for. We’re all people. We can all share in the creation of music.”

I had to ask: if you aren’t better than the people you are playing music for, why should they listen to your ideas and your problems when they’ve got more than enough of their own?

His answer was that great art isn’t about imparting knowledge or ideas from the artist into the audience; it’s about helping the audience find something in itself that it shares with the artist. He says, “Great artists throughout time have said something that hit something within us, that struck the same chord.”

Another answer I would have accepted is ‘we play really good music.’ Of course, he’s too modest to have been so blunt, but he touched on the transformative power of music (e.g. the power to make really bad lyrics tolerable) earlier in our conversation.

“Music has so many indescribable and intangible qualities that make it a different experience than just having a conversation with somebody, and I think that’s where people kind of get lost, too, in the idea that musicians are better than regular people. Not necessarily musicians but the music itself affects people emotionally.”