Tal Wilkenfeld
Appearances
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Exactly. And that was the best form of learning, I think. Just like, well, what do you perceive here? And, well, I heard this. And just discussing that. Jazz, usually? Or... No, all styles of music. And yeah, he told me that story about on your worst day. Because, you know, like, yeah, even then, like when I was like 18, 19, I get sad sometimes about performances. Like, I could have done this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
It's like, I don't do that anymore, thankfully. Or I'd be miserable.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Yeah. Yeah, now I do. Now it's just I sense the body feeling fatigued, especially if it's a very long show. Like the ones I just did were three-hour shows, and we did one- to three-hour sound checks. So that's a lot of physical activity every day. So I just feel the body being tired, like fatigued. The ears are fatigued. That's about it. I don't really reflect on the show much.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Yeah, I don't want to identify with it because then I'm tired, but I'm not tired. I'm usually like energized.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
There is critique, but not in the way that it would diminish my sense of self. It's different. I can just kind of... look at something and be like, okay, well actually next time I'll do this choice and this choice maybe. Maybe this would serve the song better. Maybe this would help the groove feel more like this. But it's not like I suck because I did this and I'm a loser.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
It depends if it's affecting you negatively.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Well, if it brings your frequency down and you feel less joyful inside, unless you don't feel complete, you feel less than, less worthy of something, then you could call that bad if you aspire to not feel that way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
That's fair.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
A word that I prefer over confidence is trust because I think with confidence is almost like
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
there's a belief assigned to it that i am this thing that you believe in whereas trust is just simply knowing that you can get up there and handle whatever is going to come your way and it's more it's more of an open feeling where it's like yeah i could i could do this sure but not like i'm a bad motherfucker like you know what i mean this is a huge difference because
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
I've shared the stage with people who have a lot of confidence and it can be like a brick wall, just like fear is a brick wall.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Trust and lack of fear. Yeah. And also I will say, you know, that each individual has developed likes and dislikes over their lifetime. And that can be like, in this case, we're just talking aesthetic likes and dislikes. So... In this particular case, obviously our likes and dislikes are very much aligned such that the things I do to compliment him, he enjoys and vice versa.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
But it could be two, you know, very trusting, open musicians on stage that don't have walls up, but their choices are very different. And one person likes heavy metal and the other person likes classical. So it's, it's gotta be both.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
It used to be that it would only be on stage. It started with that. That was almost like my way in to flow state and meditation was playing music. And then back in the day when I'd kind of crash after shows, I wanted to change that. I wanted to always feel like I'm in flow state.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
I've gotten a lot better. I'm still obviously on the journey, but yes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
I meditate every day. When I'm on tour with my band, I ask that we all meditate together for at least 20 minutes. And I don't dictate which type of meditation. I don't put on a guided meditation because everyone has their own
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
thing they want to do maybe someone might be praying in their head it doesn't matter it's just the idea that we all put our phones down and we all are in one room connecting energetically spiritually and just letting our lives go for a second and then we walk straight on the stage and it's always really connected and there were a couple gigs where we ran out of time for that and i could tell there was a there was a major difference in the performance
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Yeah. But then when I'm home, like I love to meditate and I've tried various styles of meditation and studied various types of things. So I don't do just one thing. I kind of customize it depending on where I'm at in my life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
You know, it's hard to accept that we won't create something musically again in this lifetime. But in terms of the grief... Grief was easier for me because I went through a major grief period in 2016 and 17. And that was the first time I'd really gone through the process of grief in a non-family situation, like with friends and mentors and people that I'd created with, which is different.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
It's a different kind of connection. When my grandparents died, it's like, There was nothing left unsaid, and I was at peace with what was happening. With this, when Prince died out of the blue in mid-2016, and then Leonard Cohen died in November...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
That just tore me to shreds because Leonard Cohen was not just someone that profoundly inspired me, you know, musically and lyrically, but spiritually, we had a very deep connection. And that was the basis of a lot of our conversation was spirituality. And so at that time, I felt like a piece of me went missing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
And that was a very long process where I just stayed in my place and didn't want to play a note of music. I kind of wanted to just get rid of all my stuff. So I had a friend come over and he's like, you should just, why don't you come to the comedy store? I'm like, comedy store? Like, what am I going to go to some store and buy clown suits? Like, what are you talking about? What's a comedy store?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
He's like, no, no, no. Like the comedy store, the place where like comedians go. I'm like, okay, well, I've never seen standup. I don't, you know, I've seen Seinfeld on TV. That's like the extent of my standup experience. So he took me to the comedy store.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
and every single one of those comedians like embraced me like i was family it didn't even take a day i was like part of the family and i made like 25 best friends and i ended up throwing all my stuff in storage and like finding a little room to stay in where i rented my gear out um My rent paying was me loaning the gear because I didn't want any responsibilities financial.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
I just wanted to be completely free so that I could just process it and not feel like I had to commit to anything else.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
work-wise or creatively i just wanted to unplug and so this was like a fun and very different way to unplug because you know previously i may have just gone to a monastery and spent you know weeks at a monastery or months but in this case i was like you know what this is a different kind of experience i'm gonna just hang out with comedians and stay in this room and
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Yeah. Other than to really deeply connect with this grief that I'm experiencing. I'm not going to negate it. I'm going to really fully connect to it. And I did. And it was tough. And then, you know, more people in 2017 were leaving. Greg Allman, Tom Petty. I mean, it was like, these are people that I worked with, all these people, and like had...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
great connections with them and they were all going and the world was mourning the loss of these people because of everything that they'd given to the world. Like they'd changed the world's lives, not just mine because I knew them personally. And so that was also complicated and why for me it was interesting to be grieving the loss of these musicians with comedians. Mm-hmm. And I learned a lot.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
It changed my life because I just learned to laugh at absolutely anything. Everything. I mean, my grandpa had a really great sense of humor, too. My grandpa's a Holocaust survivor. And, like, he could just kind of, like, laugh at anything. And, like, so I already kind of have that in me. But being around all these comedians just kind of, like, exaggerated that for me.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
And that really changed things for me for the better. So then when Jeff Beck died... It was like, okay, I've got these tools. I know what this is. And I'm going to go through it again. And I'm going to be on tour with Incubus in two days.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
And so Mike Durnt from Green Day, he called me up and he said, hey, like, I know you're going through a lot. And I said, I don't even know what I'm going to play. Like, I really want a vintage jazz bass for this. And I only have a 70s one that I don't really think is appropriate. I really need a 60s one, blah, blah, blah. And Mike's like, I'm going to hook you up.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
He showed up to my place the next day with a truckload of old P basses and jazz basses and brought them all into my studio. And I'm playing them. And then I pull one out of the case. And it's Olympic white, just like Jeff Beck. And... I play it and not only did I get goosebumps and started crying, but I looked over at Mike and same thing was happening.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
And he's like, uh, I guess, I guess Jeff might, might be happy about this. And he's like, well, you know, I didn't want to let this one go. I was just trying to cheer you up a bit and maybe loan it to you for the tour. But if you really want it, it's yours. And I was like, oh my God. This is like, Mike Dunn is the nicest guy ever. So that happened.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
So that bass's name is Jeff, and it's a white jazz bass, and I played it on the Incubus tour. But yeah, I do feel like I'm more equipped to handle grief now.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
connected somehow i think everyone's connected spiritually in the same way so i think personality wise um comedians and musicians are quite different actually in what way
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Well, you'd have to subdivide even musicians into different categories too, because, you know, the thing that I appreciate about comedians is that, you know, you go to a restaurant with them and like all the observational humor of like, they'll notice everything. and make you laugh about it, which a really great songwriter does the same thing too.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
And my favorite lyricists like Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, they, you know, Warren Zevon, they add comedy into their lyric. And like, so those types of people, I would liken to hanging out with a comedian. It's very different from like, say somebody that is an instrumental guitarist or something like that, that they're more focused on,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
whether it's, like, a kinesthetic thing or, like, a physical thing or whatever it is, they're not quite doing the observational thing in the same way. So I just appreciate, like, my favorite thing to do is... Go out and laugh, especially because like I can tend to be pretty analytical and be in my head. And so anything that just kind of lets me be in my heart and just enjoy life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
So right after Leonard Cohen passed away, the comedy store threw me a birthday party. It was this crazy lineup. And like, it was like, I'd play a song with my band and, um, and then Jackson Brown sat in and like sung a song and then like Dave Chappelle came up and said some jokes. It was, it was like one of my favorite nights ever.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Yeah. It was cool. It was, it was a very healing birthday party. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Yeah, well, the mothership has some magic to it too. It's really cool. It's different, totally different vibe, but like super awesome.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Great. I love that song.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Yeah, but as a whole piece, I appreciate it so much. I actually lived at the Chelsea Hotel, and when Leonard and I first met, That was one of the first things we talked about was, you know, I lived there where all that stuff went down before they tore it apart. And, yeah, it's just a beautiful song.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
It could be both or either, you know? I mean, that's the beautiful thing about poetry and lyric is that it's supposed to be open.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Definitely. I mean, the thing that he taught me or his advice to me was when you're writing a song, look at it the next morning, like just first thing and read it and then take a walk, smoke a joint, read it again. Go have a fight with your, you know, daughter. Come back. Read it again. Get drunk. Read it again. Wait a week. Read it again.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Just so that, you know, from every state and every position, the wider the lens is going to be from an audience perspective. You want things to mean multiple things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
I think it's an amazing line. It's one of the best lines in the song.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
When he put that song out, obviously he didn't regret it or he wouldn't have put that lyric in the song. I think what happened was that eventually word got out either from him or from somebody else that the song was about Janis Joplin.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
And so at that point, he regretted the indiscretion. So it wasn't that he regretted how great the line was. It was just, you know, the privacy factor. But then again...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
leonard's known for rewriting his lyrics and in his live shows you'll see a bunch of songs where it's like new lyrics and he didn't do it because he didn't like the old lyrics he just did it because he could because he's leonard and it's like why not have fun with words the way musicians have fun you know improvising solos on stage and he could have changed that line in chelsea hotel after in retrospect and he never did
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
It's so powerful.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Well, that's what's so great about it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Yeah, but why is it heartbreaking? It could also be just beautiful that they had a little fling.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Because I lived there and it was like, it meant something to me to sing that song. And actually, when I put that song out on YouTube, that's when he sent me an email. He's like, hey, do you want to come over?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
No, we met in a rehearsal studio. I ended up watching their whole rehearsal and sitting there next to Roshi, his like 105-year-old monk, which was really great. I remember when I was like shaking his hand. So I was like, it was just me and Roshi on the couch watching Leonard with his band. And we're shaking hands. And he grips my hand like this, like doesn't let it go.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Passed the Roshi test. And then what's funny was that the next thing that happened about five minutes later was Leonard Cohen got down on his knees and opened up a jar. I'm not kidding you of caviar. This is not a callback.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
He started feeding the monk caviar.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
And that healed my Montreux Jazz Festival sadness forever.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Why do we need to know?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
I'm divided about that answer because... I think just things are flowing. I don't think anything's kind of like planned out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
I think everything's connected. So, yes. But predetermined means like... I don't believe in the predetermined stuff necessarily, which is different from... Whatever your previous karma is. And karma is a whole other kind of conversation. I don't mean karma as in like good karma, bad karma. Just karma meaning the collection of things you've acquired over this lifetime or other lifetimes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Just whatever that is. whatever that is, is going to influence your future.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
I think that loneliness is a product of feeling separate from the world and separate from others. And that the less you experience that separation, the less you'll feel lonely.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
It's less and less every single year. Because I work very hard at it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Yeah, just meditating and studying scriptures.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
In what sense?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Is it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
I felt like I lost a piece of myself that I had given to somebody else. And I feel like people feel that in romantic exchanges, whether it's long-term, short-term. You give a piece of yourself, and then if that person dies or you break up with that person, you feel like you've lost that piece of yourself.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Which I feel like is a very different experience than if you just are opening yourself rather than giving a piece of yourself. You're just opening yourself to somebody or something.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
No, it's a loving experience.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Yeah, because you can't lose a piece of yourself if you are the same self as every other self.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
fundamentally lonely experience but you're saying it's it's healing it's healing yeah because i just get to sit there and not worry about all this stuff that like this these meaningless attachments i've got my suitcase with my necessities or my three suitcases sometimes and uh I can just sit there and meditate and just be with myself. And it's so awesome.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
And usually like you plan your touring for like, you know, you kind of get the business aspect of things taken care of in advance. So you can kind of just really be flowing day to day on a tour. And it's a great feeling. It's funny because this last tour that I did, we didn't have hotels every night. We had hotels maybe like once a week. And I hadn't done that before.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Usually, I'm frequently in hotels. So I didn't get that space that I'm really used to getting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
I very much missed it and had to be very creative. And I ended up like... going into the back lounge when everyone was asleep and like meditating back there or like before everyone woke up. And I actually like joined, there was like an online meditation retreat that was happening. It was like 12 hours a day of silent meditations. that happens once a year.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
And I love this, this particular group of people. And they knew I was on tour. So they're like, just join when you can. And so I was on the tour doing the meditation retreat at the same time. It was so fun. It was so fun because I was like in the back lounge, the bus is like moving around like this. My laptop, the zoom is like, and I'm just like sitting like meditating.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
It was like, yeah, this is the shit.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Yeah, yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
These particular retreats that I started doing, it's not straight silent. There are, you know, silent sits every hour for 50 minutes. And then there's some talks. And like these people that I've been working with are really cool because they're integrating spiral dynamics into Zen. And it's like the coolest combination.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Like Ken Wilber. Do you know Ken Wilber? Integral theory?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Yeah. It's hard to explain how it applies to this type of meditation because it's in the guided parts of the meditation that this whole like holonic theory is like brought in about like transcending and including everything
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
um aspect of your being um because he talks about like levels of development and like it in consciousness and how like this applies to like every single religion or non-religion that there are these levels of development and from all that go all the way up to enlightenment no matter what you start off with it could be you know, Christianity, Buddhism, Vedanta, it doesn't matter, like anything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Then I just like, I like it when everything is, and everyone is taken into account. It doesn't matter where you're coming from, that there is a way to be self-realized, self-actualized. There are self-actualized beings from all walks of life with very, very different paths. There's no one path.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
I mean, in this particular retreat I do, there's like a lot of silent sits and then there's some guided meditations. Um, but I've tried a lot of different avenues and they're all great. So I wouldn't just say, just try this one thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Like I've studied like the Upanishads, like with Vedanta teachers and like gone through those texts for months and months and stayed at monasteries and like how they break it down makes total sense to my mind and heart. And like my, more importantly than my mind, like my inner knowing, like it resonates.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Yeah, because like, Your mind is like the thinking tool. It's not you. You're not your mind. You're not your thoughts. You're not your body. So it's like just the you, like that knowing that you have. When something resonates there, that's usually when you go with something.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
It's the best.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
It's just an empty room with a tiny single bed and a sheet and a pillow, and that's it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
You have to eat the same thing as everyone.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
What is it? Very plain, cheap, basic food, which is funny for someone like me because I'm pretty particular about my diet.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
You wake up at 5 a.m. to the bell and you go and meditate like constantly till bedtime other than two meals.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Well, if you're talking about the Zen monastery, cause I stayed in a Zen monastery, um, and I did a thing with that. Um, the guy was telling you about that kind of, uh, the integral Zen thing where he uses Ken Wilber's work in combination with Zen, that that's a little bit different cause he does talks. We talk about things. Um,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
And that's very separate from the Vedanta monasteries I've stayed at, which there's very little meditation in terms of sitting silently. Instead, we are meditating on the scriptures, like the Upanishads, and we're diving into that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
They both have been incredibly helpful to me because the Vedanta, anytime I go into my head about something, the answer is there based on this knowledge. with the Zen monastery, it's like, you just gotta put your butt in the seat and sit and wait. And maybe something will happen, maybe it won't, but just keep sitting. And it's very disciplined and you go through a lot. Your body's purging a lot.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
There's a lot and you don't necessarily have the answers as to what is happening. And so I think for somebody like me, I need both. I need to be in a place where there's complete uncertainty, but complete discipline and just doing the regimented thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
And then there's the me that feels very satisfied from an analytical standpoint, understanding what's happening, like what is the gross and the subtle body and the, you know, like I want to understand these things about what it is to be a human. So I like them both.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Yes. More so like the analysis part.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
But sitting with yourself, there's no better education of like facing every demon and it's all going to come out and it's not going to be pretty. But then there's things that happen on the other side of it that are so profound.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
I've met the demons that have come out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Who knows?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Well, the last album I put out is pretty self-explanatory as to what that is.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
There was, yeah. Some of it was storytelling and Some of it was real experience, and it's always like a combination of things. I serve the song. So sometimes you use your own life experience to tell a song, and sometimes you may watch a movie. and part of that script merges with your own experience, and that tells the right story for the point you're trying to make in the song.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
So it varies from song to song in terms of what a biographical it is.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
My favorite love songs are the ones where you're not sure it's about romantic love or love of God or love of life or just pure love. I was thinking George Harrison writes songs like that, like What Is Life? Or like Bob Dylan's song that George Harrison covered, If Not For You.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Right, right. That's kind of like where, well, what I'm experiencing now. And so who knows what will end up coming out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Yeah, I've been writing. A little bit? I don't have an intention of putting something out in any particular time frame, but I'm just writing and letting things flow. There's a bunch of Leonard Cohen songs, too, where you're like, there's so many ways to interpret this song, and there's so many ways... I just love songs that aren't so specifically about one thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Oh, yeah? What did he say? Okay.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
I love those.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
No. We just hung out and had very long conversations about everything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Yeah. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Yeah, I just grew up in an environment that was focused on academia. And I fell in love with guitar and really just wanted the focus to be that. So my limit was 30 minutes a day for, I don't even remember how many times a week.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
No. And so I just learned how to visualize the fretboard in my head and I'd practice all day in my head. It's kind of like, you know, the Queen's Gambit, the TV show with Anya Taylor-Joy and she just like sees it on the ceiling. I used to do that with the fretboard. Yeah, just practice. And I actually recommend it to every musician because...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
If you're just practicing here, you don't know what is more dominant necessarily. Is it this or is it your motor skills? If you just take that away and do it here, you know you've got it. So I'm glad that that happened and that I learned how to do that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
And in terms of like learning fast, because like I had to like learn how to, well, I had to try to absorb a lot of information in a short amount of time when I did have the instrument. I kind of would like do things in bursts, like even in that half an hour, I would just go like play for a couple of minutes and then I'd stop for like a minute.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
And then I'd do it again, and I noticed there was a huge difference between the first time and the second time, whereas if I just kept repeating stuff, it would be much slower.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Just hang out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Yeah, it's like my brain was telling me, just chill out for a sec. That's enough information. Let me take a second to integrate that. That's at least what it felt like to me. And the most hilarious thing happened a couple months ago. I know you're friends with Andrew Huberman. Mm-hmm. So he put out some clip, which was a part of one of his podcasts, about learning.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
And he said that there was some research done on learning fast and that if you practice something for a minute or so and then you let your brain rest for 30 seconds or a minute, that in that 30 seconds or a minute, your brain – does the repetition 20 to 30 times faster and in reverse. And I was like, whoa, that's so cool because that's what I used to do when I was a kid.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Like now there's science that proves that, which is really cool for musicians to know that. that that's a good way to practice efficiently. Because, you know, like some musicians, they're like practicing for six, seven, eight hours a day. I've never done that. I've never practiced more than an hour a day, even now. Like I've just, just that's my technique and it works.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Now I'm not practicing as much. I'm more always writing songs in my head, so that's why I like silence. That's why I love being in the empty hotel room and being alone. Songs come to me while I'm showering or walking around doing the dishes. occasionally when I'm hanging out with friends or like comedians and people just like say shit and I'll be like, that's a cool line.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
I'm just like jot it down on my phone.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
It's more lyrical than musical now because it's like, for me, it's like, well, there's so much music in the world. If I'm going to write a song, I want, I want the song to be about something interesting. And so, yeah, the words matter to me.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
And like when you mentioned Hallelujah, you know, he wrote like 80 verses to Hallelujah before he narrowed it down to like four. And it took him like 15, 20 years to write that song. So some writers will do that. And then other writers just vomit it out and it's beautiful. Mm-hmm. Like I've heard that Bob Dylan or Joni Mitchell, they're fast writers. They just kind of comes out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
He just would spend months and years and constantly refining and refining.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Yeah, it's song dependent. Some just flow out and it's like, oh, there it is. Everything's there. And then other songs, it's like you might have started it with music and there's some words that come out and then trying to fill in the rest of the words. Sometimes it can be like a square peg in a round hole and other times it's like, oh no, I can... You know, it depends.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Sometimes it becomes like a math problem and hopefully it doesn't because you just want to say what's right for the song. And usually when you, you know, write it all together, like the lyric and the melody and the chords and everything's kind of developing at once, at least for the first draft, that's very, very helpful. Mm-hmm. Like Sondheim used to write like that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Just like he wouldn't move on until like he would just go this way. Whereas for me, it's just like, I'll just go with what seems to be coming naturally and I'll just let it be what it is. And then you come back and you say, okay, well, what do I have to do to this now? What's needed?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
I think first and foremost, understanding why you are playing music. If it's because you have something that you're trying to express or that you're just in love with expression itself, with art itself, those are great reasons. Um, to start this journey. The why should be... I think the why is really important because it's a jagged lifestyle and there's a lot in it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
And so if you don't have your purpose, if you're not centered in your purpose, then all that jagged lifestyle is probably going to get to you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Yeah, it's jagged. It's... It's all over the place. It's uncertain. It's one thing, one moment, and a completely different thing, another moment. You never know what's going to happen. And if you thrive on variety, which I love variety, then it's perfect. But also every human being needs a certain amount of certainty and structure.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
And so the certainty can come from your inner knowing, knowing that you're doing exactly what you want to be doing and knowing what your purpose is in doing it, in this expression. Otherwise, you're just kind of like a leaf blowing in the wind.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Yeah, it's a lot of like the physical labor aspect of it is really hard. Playing on stage to two people or 2,000 or 20,000, that doesn't make a difference. I mean, it makes a difference to the ticket sales, which informs what level of luxury you might have on the road or not. But other than that, it's just people there listening to music. The music doesn't change.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
No, because the idea is to be doing, like having a great conversation on stage.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Yeah. I mean, I always like, there's certain points in shows where I'm just like, I consciously am like, oh yes, there's an audience over there. Because I'm so like wrapped up in whatever's happening on stage.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Well, maybe I'm remembering myself.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
both you know like every instrument has its strengths beauty limitations range like possible range that can you know be extended to some degree or another depending on who you are like trumpet or something you know like certain people can hit higher notes than others blah blah blah but um That being said, we're all playing the same 12 or 24, however you divide the octave, that many notes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
We're all playing the same notes. So in that sense, it's all the same thing. It's just music, or better yet, it's just art or expression. But yeah, every instrument has, you know, you've got to go through the physical...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
the physical aspects of it the motor skills and all of that and hopefully you get through that really quickly so you can get to the expression quickly because if you get stuck in just that first phase that's be really boring yeah but that's a there's a pretty long phase the technical the the technical skill required to really play an instrument
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
For some people it's a long thing and some people it's short. It very much varies. It might have to do with like how you learn and getting to know like your strengths in learning, like more oral or more like, is it more like, like what's your strength and playing off of those strengths.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
So for me, like it was like, like I was saying earlier, it was just an intuitive thing that I knew I can feel when my brain is full, like that it needs processing time. And so I listened to that. I don't push past it. Uh, even if it's like one minute and I do something, I'm like, okay, silence. And then I come back and it's in a, and I trust that it's going to be there and is there. So yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Just trusting yourself, I think, is really important. Trusting that you know you better than anybody else is going to know you. So that's the kind of thing with teachers that can be either really, really helpful and great or really not great. I'm primarily self-taught. I've had amazing mentors of all walks of life. And
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
I think I'm unbelievably blessed that my mentors are some of my favorite musicians on earth, whether it's Leonard Cohen or Jeff Beck or Wayne Shorter, whoever these people are, like they are my favorite musicians. So, not everyone has that opportunity, but what the opportunity that we have now that I didn't have when I was starting is that everything's on YouTube.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Like every interview with every genius, like you don't need to necessarily have these people in person now. I mean, it... And then I'll say to that, yes and no. I agree with myself and then I don't agree with myself. And the reason is I do believe that there is something that happens when you're in person with a master.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
In some cases that there is something transferred that is not intellectual, it's not spoken, it's something else that happens, that can happen, that I've experienced. And I really value that experience.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
I think it's more here.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Yeah, because I think the fingers is more this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Yeah, slowing down is really great too.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Slowing everything down. It could be, you know, I can play something really fast, but I may want to like practice it
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Because there's all these... micro movements that are happening that if you just go, like you can't pay as close attention to the exact tone that you're pulling from each note. And there's a lot to pay attention to, to how my fingers are touching the string here. Like I can change my tone a million ways just by the direction of this finger. And same with how this lands and how
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
I'm attacking the string. And with what intention am I hitting the string? Emotionally, physically. And so even if you can go, blah, blah, blah, play that so slow. See how locked into a pocket you can be. See how you feel every aspect of that. Because then when it gets sped up, it's still there with you. Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
It's kind of like the transcended and included thing that Ken Wilber talks about.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
It is. I've... Yeah, it is. Because I hear there are certain people, it's like they play really fast, but I don't hear the fullness of tone always. And it's like, well, it's probably because maybe they didn't. Maybe it's because they didn't slow it down and really sit with each note and let it like resonate through their whole being. It's spiritual. It's like a spiritual expression.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
It's not just like, you know, it's not a sport. A lot of people treat music like a sport.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Yeah, I wasn't nervous. I think that you can get an adrenaline rush before a stage, which is natural. But I think as soon as you bring fear to a bandstand, you're limiting yourself. You're kind of like walling yourself off from everyone else. If you're afraid, like, what is there to be afraid of?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
It's the same with like sitting with your own emotions. It's like when emotions are overwhelming to us, we get real busy. We move real fast because it's like we don't want to feel our feelings. Those are the moments to slow yourself down.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Just be with it. Be like, be cool with it. Like, love it. Love the anger.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Bass and bass? Okay. Well, one is a fish.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Can you pronounce my name?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Wow. Wow. Most people say tal.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Or tall.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Like so many people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
I don't know, but the fact that you said my name right, you get extra points.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Slap is like this. Fingerstyle is like this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Yeah, sometimes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
No accusation taken?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
That would be pretty hilarious if I was sensitive about bass techniques, but not about love.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
I slap less, a lot less, almost never actually. It has a very distinctive sound and does a very distinctive thing to a song that is not something I hear needed very often in music today. But in certain styles, like funk, it sounds awesome and it makes sense. It was something that was a bit overused at one point. For instance, like my mentor, Anthony Jackson, he refused to slap.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Like he actually said, if you want me to slap, I'll leave this gig. So I'm not like that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Because he's sensitive about it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
And then, I mean, I'm playing electric bass. So generally speaking, you don't particularly want to hear electric bass on straight ahead jazz anyway. You want to hear an upright bass. But if I was to play jazz on electric bass, I might even kind of like palm mute. You know, like instead of going like, I might go.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Anything to kind of make the notes shorter and less resonant and like kind of fade away quick because the upright does that naturally. And I have like a different bass, like a hollow body harmony that sounds closer to an upright that I'll use.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Like on my song Under the Sun that I put out, that was on a harmony bass and it has like kind of an upright acoustic kind of tone to it, but with more sustain.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Again, you can have both. You can have either on anything. There's no like real rules.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
You must be afraid of making a mistake and therefore you're coming at it as like a perfectionist and you can't come at music that way or it's not going to be as expansive and vulnerable and true. So, no, I was excited and passionate and having the best time. And also, you know, the fact that he... gave me this solo. The context of this performance is that this was a guitar festival.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Just one thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
That... And it's what time you're leaving. Okay.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Three minutes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
The don'ts is just to please leave your fear at the door.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
And your do's is to be open to anything and open your ears, like respond to what's happening now. I think that quote you're talking about might have been more about an individual musician's unique sound. Because everyone has their sound.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
If they've developed their voice and they've listened to their own aesthetic preferences, of which everyone is slightly different, everyone has slightly different likes and dislikes. then you'll have a unique sound on your instrument and your unique sound is defined more by the choices you make rather than, I mean, it's equally as defined by the choices you make and the choices you don't make.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
I mean, it's the flip side of the same coin, really.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Yeah, that quote you're talking about might have even had to do with someone's real limitations on an instrument, that then that would define their sound as the things that they actually can't do, versus what you're choosing to do versus not choosing to do, which is that flip side of the same coin thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Well, his hands were huge. There was no other place for the thumb to go. And it was great that he could reach the E string and that was an advantage. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Actually, flipping a guitar is different. It does bring out something different in you because I've done a flipped and it's like, oh, wow. Yeah, it's really different. I remember talking to my like osteopath about like, you know, cause there's so much weight on this shoulder while I'm playing all the time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
And, and they were saying like, well, just after shows, just literally just turn it upside down and do the exact same thing in the opposite way. It'll like even out your body. And I was like, it's good advice.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
I've heard of him.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Chocolate cookies.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
I like macadamia nut. Like if you really want to get into it with like white chocolate.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Chocolate chip is just so easy. You can kind of get them anywhere.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Well, there's no spiritual difference.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
But, uh, Well, musically, yeah, it's kind of like what we were saying earlier. It's like each genre has its language of what makes it that genre. And that would be a good thing to say it's defined by the do's and don'ts because, yeah, it's like I'm trying to think. Basically, I put the song first, and I think of the song as the melody, the lyrics, and then the harmony, and obviously the groove.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
It's one of the biggest guitar festivals in the world because it's Eric Clapton's festival. And there's like 400 guitarists that are all playing solos all night. And we were, like, towards the end of the night. And I could tell, like, Jeff, like, got, like, a kick out of, you know, I'm not going to solo on, like, one of my most well-known songs, Castle Bend and His Lovers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
They're both things that are held in my mind. It's like, okay, genre, and then song, which is comprised of those basic elements. Yeah. And I tend to kind of prioritize lyric because somebody is trying to express something over music. And so the lyric is very, very important. And so then the choices come from there. It's like, okay, within the genre of X, this is the typical language.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
And then how do I best serve this lyric? And then... Where else can I pull from that might not be in these two bags that would put a little twist on it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
So those are all the kinds of things I might be thinking about. But I don't like twists for the sake of twists either. I like twists because I want to hear something that might be fresh.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
But when someone does something just to be hip, it's annoying to me. I think you can hear the difference. It's like when people write in odd time signatures or they write all these riffs just because they can, just because they have the chops to do it or they know how to play in 11.16 and whatever. But if it's not...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
actually creating a piece of music that's going to move somebody then why are you doing it and so i think a lot of the questions i'm asking myself when i'm approaching a song are mainly philosophical and aesthetic so you like to stand on the edge of the cliff not for the thrill of it but because that's where you find something new yeah potentially yeah and it's thrilling
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
I'm not doing it for the thrill. It just happens to be thrilling. All right. Because you can always reel it back in.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Yeah, you can. You can do a totally disciplined... I can go into a session and... Okay, my favorite thing about going into a session with musicians that I adore is that we don't hear the demo... Because if you hear a demo, you're hearing what the producer or songwriter have already imagined that every instrument is playing. And then it's like, well, I've already heard what you want.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Now my mind is, part of my mind is focused on what I already know you want and what the destination is going to be. Why did you bring me in here? I want to not hear it. I just want you to set it a piano and sing the song. I want to hear the chords and the lyric and sit in an acoustic guitar, play it, and then let's all go in the room and then take one.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
I would say 80% of the time take one has the most gold. And there might be like a mistake or two or someone forgot to go to the B section. And you might want to like punch that in so that you're hitting the right chord. But all the magic is in that take. And then sometimes it happens where it's like you go, it's like we're rehearsing and take one, two, three, four, five.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
And then you're like thinking about it too much. And then you go and you have a dinner and you come back and the next take one after dinner is the one. Like it's usually after there's some sort of a break. But obviously there's exceptions to that rule. Sometimes it's take two and three.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Well, Stevie Wonder wrote it, but people know Jeff for that song and his solo on it. Like, I'm going to give it to my bass player. And, like, he did. And, like, he's, like, bowing. Like, he didn't have to do that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Yeah, well, with that particular album that we made together, it's called Welcome to America. He called me up and asked me, he said, I want to make a band with you. I'm really inspired by what you're doing with Jeff Beck. I want to make a trio together. do you like the drum rolls of Jack DeJeanette was like his first question to me. I'm like, well, yeah, who doesn't?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Who doesn't like Jack DeJeanette? Like one of the greatest of all time. And he's like, well, you know, sounds like, because we had a discussion about drumming, sounds like you're kind of particular about drummers. So why don't you find us the drummer and I'll trust you to find the drummer.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
You can audition some people, send me some recordings and maybe your two favorites and I'll pick out of the two or something. So I did that, went on a journey, found a couple of guys. He picked the one. We went in and he basically just would be like, okay, so the A section is going to go like this. And then the B section, I think we're going to go to G and then the bridge.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
I might go to B flat, but maybe I'll hold off. Okay, let's go. One, two, three, four. And then we recorded it to tape. There was no part. He did not want me to punch anything. Like it was like, and there was one song called, um, same page, different book. And he like talked through it just like he did. And then he had me soloing between each phrase, like little fills. It's like, I'd,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
I didn't know that that was going to come up. And he loved that. He loved to have me on the edge of my seat, like falling off the cliff. That was my first real falling off a cliff moment from somebody else's holding me at the edge of the cliff. You know what I mean? Now I just do it on my own because it's so fun and it makes sense. It's the best thing for the music.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Like if you record to tape and there's like, say like you hit a bum note, like to punch in means to like... fix that note like we record over that one little area and and punch that note in he didn't want that he like he's like all my favorite records just like whatever happened happened that's that moment in time let's make a new moment in time it's great nobody makes records like that anymore
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Everyone wants to edit and edit and re-record and this and that. And unfortunately, with a lot of music, I'm not saying all music because there's plenty of great music coming out, but there's the danger of it being flat because every little imperfection is digitally removed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Yeah. I mean, you can kind of program imperfections too.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
That's also very sad.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
It just shows what a generous musician he is, and that's evident in his playing across the board. He is a generous, loving, open musician. He's not there for himself. He's there for the music. And he thought, well, this would be the perfect musical thing to do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Another big sigh.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Is that a compliment?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Thank you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
The thing I love about Jeff Beck is that he played the guitar like a singer. And I think that the way that Wayne Shorter played his saxophone, it's like a singer. And I think everyone, every musician aspires to just sound like a singer.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
It's so funny because when I listen to some of the music that I create, like my solo music, I'm like, I could see how this is a combination of Herbie Hancock, Rage Against the Machine, and Jimi Hendrix.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
I hear the influences. It's funny.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
I love that he is two voices combined into one voice. So it's like, there is his voice on the guitar and there is his, his singing voice. And there is the combination of the two that make one voice. And of course the third element.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
is his songwriting and all of this have have this beautiful chemistry and all work geniusly perfectly together and there's nothing like it and you know he he always beat himself up about being a singer and like he didn't like his voice but it's like my favorite singers are the singers that don't sound like singers bob dylan bob dylan you like bob dylan love bob dylan
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
I love his voice.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
He's expressing his lyrics. It's just pure expression. Exactly what he means. I feel everything that he's saying with 100% authenticity. That's what I want to hear from a singer. I don't care how many runs you can do and like, I want to believe what you're saying.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
There's countless, like Neil Young. I mean, there's so many musicians. I love Elliot Smith for that reason.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Supportive.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
And it kind of all started when I went to audition for him, which was an interesting experience because I got food poisoning on the plane. And so literally when the plane landed, I went straight into an ambulance into a hospital overnight. The manager picked me up and I showed up at Jeff's door, which was like a three-hour drive through windy country roads.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Not necessary. I feel like anybody that's truly passionate about something that they want to be great at or a master of or this and that, they've already got that person inside their own head. You don't need somebody else to do that for you. I think you need love, acceptance, guidance, support, time. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
advice if you ask for it just a space just a nice open space all my mentors were just that for me they didn't tell me to do anything they they didn't care like it because they're not Why do they need to be invested in where I'm going? Only I know where I'm going. So for some mentor to come and be like, this is what you need to be doing and practice this. It's like, but why?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
What if that's not my path? That might be your path. So I'm not really, again, otherwise it feels like a sport, like who can run the fastest race. And it's like, well, okay, well, I get that for that, for sport. Maybe it makes sense to have someone a bit more hardcore, but still like, I would say athletes have the same mentality. They've got that in them already too.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
So I think more like of a strategic approach to mentorship works really well and mainly just having an open space and just being available to someone.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Exactly. Because if you do have that harsh critic inside you, it's like it is nice to have somebody that isn't like your family or someone that's not obligated in any way that just sees your talent and they're like, yeah, I dig what you're doing. Keep doing it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Do you have any mentors?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Do you wish you did?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Because you do jujitsu.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
My dad does. My dad's super into it. I love my dad. He's the coolest. But no, I don't do it. He's a blue belt right now.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Not yet. But I plan on it. You should do it. What belt are you? Black belt. Sick. Do you want to go on that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
But for that, for instance, do you need a harsh mentor or teacher?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
And he answered the door and he's like, okay, you're ready to play. So we went upstairs and started like rattling off the set. And when it came to this song, Cause of Innocence Lovers, he just said solo. And he loved it and kept the solo in it. So that's kind of how, because there was no bass solo before I was playing in his band. So this whole thing was kind of new.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
But you're the one that's kind of dictating how hard you're getting pushed in a way. Like you're choosing your mentor. Like that whiplash video is like, he didn't ask for that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Well, maybe. Maybe subconsciously. I mean, there is... It's a movie, so...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
support and space to discover the thing the voice the music within you it's my personal choice because i'm very familiar with the inner critic and i can bring her out at any point i don't need help with that you know so you do have yeah she's on call she was on overdrive that's why now i'm i had to work on that so much yeah you have a really happy way about you right now thanks the very sun
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Yeah, sure.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Frequencies, each frequency does elicit a different kind of emotional response. That is real. You mean like on the physics aspect? Yeah, yeah, the physical level. So there is that combined with the right kind of lyric and the right kind of melody of the right kind of chord will elicit a very particular kind of emotion. And it is scientific. It can be analyzed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
I don't particularly want to analyze it because I don't want to approach things with that in advance. I don't want it to inform where I'm going. I like the feeling to lead me naturally to where I'm writing. But yeah, there's a real chemical element to that. And then also, like I was saying, the lyric, what it means to you. which poetry is supposed to mean something to everybody, like different.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
It's not supposed to mean one thing. Like you can't analyze and be like, this is what this poet meant. And like we were talking about with Leonard earlier, it's like the broader you can leave a lyric, the better. You can appeal to people in so many different ways. And even to the songwriter, like I'll sing some of my songs from five years ago and I'll be like,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
I didn't even think that it could have meant that, but I guess it does. That's funny. I'll just giggle on stage suddenly because a lyric will hit me differently from a different new experience or something.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Of course. Weep like a baby in a bathtub.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
It's holy. His work is holy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
And if you were in his presence, I guess there was a lot to that being.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Just tackle the demons as early as possible, whether it's through your art or through meditation or through whatever it means, diaries, whatever it is. Just walk towards the things that are scary. Because if you don't, they'll just expand. They become bigger. If you avoid the demons, they become bigger.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
I'll always miss Jeff. But I don't feel like a piece of me is missing. And same with Leonard. It's that I did give them a piece of myself and maybe they gave me a piece of them. that I hold with me and I cherish, but it doesn't feel like I'm less than, or they're less than, or anything's less than. You learn to appreciate the impermanence of everything in life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
It's just being able to differentiate from like the body and from like expression music. All right. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Impermanence of everything except for consciousness, I guess you could say, is the only thing that is permanent. So everything else. You learn to appreciate that impermanence because the limited amount of time it takes
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
in this particular body is it's enticing kind of gives you like a time limit which is cool i like that so you've come to accept your own yeah like it's cool that i'm like okay i got this amount of maybe this amount of time who knows but you could end today but if i was yeah if i if i died today i'd be really happy with my life okay it's not like i'm like oh i missed out on this and that
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
I've always lived that way. Yeah, I felt this way since I was in my early 20s. I'd be like, yeah, I could die today. Sure. I don't want to die. I have no reason to die. But if I did, I know that I put my everything, all my effort and all my passion and all my love into whatever I've already done. So if my time's up, then my time's up.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Well, love is everything. I mean, if you define love, if you're talking about love as in romantic love or paternal or maternal love, or if you're talking about love as in an Eastern tradition, like Vedanta, for instance, love is consciousness. Love is everything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Yeah. Or if you were to come from a Zen or like a Buddhist perspective, they would say nothingness, like emptiness is versus fullness.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Do you want a suffering song or a suffering song?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Do you want a sound check and make sure I'm not?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
This one too? All right, count me off.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Yeah, you got it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
One, two.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
I call out to the ocean. My tears fall into the sea For the vows that have been broken Across the dunes of time repeatedly Like a night In battered armor I lay my sword upon the ground Cause I can't keep fighting these same battles More has been lost than has been found It's hard to feel things changing After all's been said and done We spend our lives rearranging
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Yeah. Different styles of music invite varying degrees of, I would say, uncertainty or unsafety in the way that people might perceive it. So for instance, like the tour that I was just on, like playing Allman Brothers songs, like I am standing on the edge of the cliff the entire night. And if I... you know, mess something up, mess it up. Like what even is a mistake?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Everything under the sun I walk the same road to work each Monday Every step tears at my heel I sleep not to dream but to forget on Sunday I spoke, just turning with the wheel It's hard to feel things changing After all's been said and done We spend our lives rearranging Everything under the sun Reaching for the sky, feet buried in the clouds
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Looking for some way out of the circle spinning round My eyes on the horizon seeking out the light But don't let me be lost forever in the night Cause it's hard to feel things changing After all's been said and done We spend our lives rearranging Under the sun Under the sun You're amazing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
It's quite loud. Can you see if from the headphones it's like this, Tony?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
You're such a professional.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Please.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Love, don't rescue me I've got nowhere better I wanna be I wanna be held, but not be holden Stand in my ground with one eye open This fight doesn't quite add up Love, I thought you were free But now I'm on the hook for all you've given me
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
But if I do like a little clunker or whatever it is, it's like, so what? Like I wouldn't have played half the stuff that I'm playing if I wasn't constantly standing on the edge of the cliff, like wild. And so... I don't care about those few little things. I care about the overall expression.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Doesn't matter what I say or think or do You see what you see with the lens you're looking through This fight keeps me tied to the worst in me And it's killing me Killing me Love, I'm losing my voice You led me to believe I had a choice But let's pause, retract our claws. You could take my side while I take yours. This fight keeps me tied to the worst in me. And it's killing me. killing me so
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Love, come rescue me I've got nowhere better I wanna be This fight keeps me tied to the worst in me And it's killing me Killing me Killing me Killing me
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
And then there's other gigs that, for instance, if I got called for like a pop or a country session or a show, in those environments, they may want you to play Like just play the pot and play it with a great groove and time and great dynamics and don't really veer away from the pot and stuff. And, and I've done plenty of those gigs too. It's just, it's just a different like hat you put on.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Because at the edge of the cliff is all possibilities and unknown. You don't know what's coming. And I love being there in the unknown. Otherwise, it's just like, well, why are we doing this? Am I just like a clown on stage, like showing you my skills or what I've studied in my bedroom? It's like, no.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
I want to be like pure expression happening right now and responding in real time to everything that's happening. And anytime I'm not doing that, it's like it's a waste of everybody's time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Mess what up?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
Probably. I think it's all about recovery. And the more times that you fall off the cliff, the quicker you know how to recover and the varying ways that you can recover to the point in which it's concealed so much that maybe a listener might not even know that you're recovering.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
I remember one time when I was really young. Well, not really young, but like when I was 21 or 22. Yeah, exactly. But when I was first playing with Jeff Beck. And we played at what I consider the best, the coolest jazz festival. It's Montreux Jazz. And Miles played there. Everyone played there. And they have the best speaker system ever. I was excited for months.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
And the drummer, Vinny, was practicing for eight hours in the bus on the way there. And everyone was on fire on stage. And I remember playing a note, just one note. that I really didn't like. And I let it go in the moment on stage, but as soon as I got off stage, I was really sad. And so I sat on this road case. Everyone was out celebrating. I sat on this road case with a sad face.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
And then Claude Knobs, the owner of the whole festival, came up to me. He's like, Dahl, what's wrong? And I'm like, I played a bad note. such a child and like he said all this wise stuff that you know miles davis is had imparted to him and like it fully cheered me up um he's like is there anything that would make you feel better and i was like caviar
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
dude came back 10 minutes later with this huge thing oh wow it was a joke it was a joke but he actually brought me caviar but anyway that's the that's the one time that i remember being sad about a performance now i'm just like okay whatever like it's done was it a physical slip of like the fingers or was it did you intend to play that note That I can't remember.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
I can't remember if it was just a bad choice that sounded like a clanger or why it happened. It was so long ago, but I don't get depressed about that anymore.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
And then like, you know, like I'm on my deathbed and just everyone's just bringing me caviar.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
That's actually a Steve Gadd quote. And Steve used to tell that to Anthony because Anthony used to get real depressed if he did a wrong thing or not perfect thing. And Steve Gadd used to say this to Anthony Jackson. And then Anthony was my first base mentor or just mentor in general.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#408 – Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen
He's a legendary bassist. And I started playing the bass when I was 17. And I moved to New York. And I met Anthony. And he started mentoring me, but in a very not typical way. Like he would just sit in his car with me for hours and talk music.