Why Sound Matters was just released in the UK and Europe on January 27 2026. The book makes an argument about sound as a material, the labor required to work with that material, and the value of that labor. But each of its more discursive chapters are introduced by shorter ones structured along the day of a musician on tour. This is Chapter 5, “Backstage”:
Backstage used to be a very social space. Bored or anxious, hungry or high, wired or exhausted, musicians waited around with little to do but talk. That talk could turn paranoid - in the eighties, I heard a lot about UFOs - or comic, or nasty. Drummer Charlie Watts famously said in 1986 that being in the Rolling Stones had been “work five years and twenty years hanging around.”
Today, backstages can be silent. People are on their smartphones or laptops and wearing headphones - not so different from an office, really. And like an office, it’s productive. There are social media accounts to tend, emails to answer, day jobs to hold down …
