San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
‘Live music was my temple’
Guitarist and songwriter Alan Lili, 31, is a musician, storyteller and psychedelic therapist who is a member of the band tulengua and host of the KPBS podcast “Port of Entry.” His band’s debut album, “Baja Funk,” was released last year, and all proceeds w
If I would have known my last show before the pandemic would be my last show for — well, who knows how long? — I might have cried onstage. Live music is a profound experience for any musical soul. It’s an incomparable adventure: playing songs that were birthed in the privacy of your inner world in front of an audience, feeding off their energy, giving them yours.
It’s almost, dare I say, sexual. It’s the closest thing to a communal spiritual experience I’ve found — what I imagine religious folks feel when singing within the warmth of their temples. Live music was my temple. Or so I thought. This pandemic has recalibrated my entire relationship to music.
My band tulengua — a bilingual hip-hop trio with members from both sides of the border — released our debut album in February 2020. We played our albumrelease show on March 10, 2020, at The Casbah. We knew of the coronavirus but thought it was an overblown media scare. People at the show shared joints and joked about the virus. We even did a “corona chant” onstage. We taunted the virus, and I don’t think the virus appreciated it. Within three days, we were in quarantine. And with it, a huge part of my identity was gone.
I thought playing live was essential to my love of music. I’ve come to realize how far off I was. Being a musician who seeks to make a living from sharing their emotions in song form is a strange thing. It’s easy to get caught thinking of other people’s opinions constantly: “How will people react to this song?” It’s easy to care about impressing people.
Releasing music, trying to grow our audience, and playing shows constantly made me lose touch with the therapeutic, medicinal core of my love for music. I still have a deep desire to share music. But all this time alone has allowed me to reconnect with a pure love of music I hadn’t felt in years. No sharing or performing, just time to feel and enjoy. The reason I play music is to connect with and process the depths of my being, and to then share that with others. But without first falling into my depths, I can’t bring anything of true value to the surface.
A teacher once told me that humans live on two planes, the horizontal and the vertical. We tend to spend most of our time in the horizontal — relationships, projects, “busyness.” The real gold, the fulfillment, is in the vertical — in the depths. This time in isolation, though challenging, has gifted me the practice of going deeper into the way music moves through my body, so that when I emerge, I can share from a more rooted place.
My hours at KPBS have been reduced, but I also spend less, so it evens out somewhat. While live shows have temporarily stopped, this time has allowed me to cultivate and develop my songwriting, production and engineering. I feel more skilled at releasing higherquality music, which will in turn translate to greater opportunities. As challenging as this past year has been, I am quite optimistic about the disguised blessings this has also brought. Everything always balances out.
“We knew of the coronavirus but thought it was an overblown media scare.”