‘Stage Fright’: The Band’s unique view of performance anxiety
The fight or flight response is a complicated one. One that The Band once tried to capture in a single song.
Anxiety is notoriously difficult to navigate, so you can only imagine the hardships of suffering from it as a celebrity and having to go on stage every single night. Or, from generally having a basic level of self-belief, which is difficult in itself without the added crush of performance anxiety.
Even though it’s not always labelled that exactly, it can manifest itself in different ways. Linda Ronstadt, for one, hates how she sounds so much that she once even said she hates listening back to her old stuff. It’s not that it was anxiety, per se, but a deep-seated disdain for her own sound that possibly came from a place of low self-esteem.
On the opposite side, you have names like Lewis Capaldi and Chappell Roan, who have both spoken out on how their mental health has made it difficult to be musicians with such an intense spotlight on them all of the time. Capaldi disappeared for a while to look after himself. Roan tried to establish better boundaries with fans, a move that was met with hostility from people thinking it was ego and not unease.
Earlier this year, Bon Iver cancelled all touring around his album due to “profound anxiety”. He went on, saying he “could see the quality of my character slowly diminishing from trying to be too much to too many people”. Countless musicians have tried to capture the feeling and their personal experiences with it, some more directly than others. Like Haim’s ‘I Know Alone’, which anchored the complicated nature of anxiety, and how, when it’s bad, we sometimes seek comfort in it.
Another one that caught the strange cycle of anxiety, specifically performance anxiety, is The Band’s ‘Stage Fright’. This looked at how, sometimes, we can experience a version of it that we keep going back to; a sort of addictive whirlwind that doesn’t tear us down but makes us feel alive.
“There was something fascinating to me of that thing, about that particular dilemma,” Robbie Robertson, who wrote the song, told Goldmine. He added, “That part of human nature, you know, that people will put themselves in that position where it scares you half to death, but you just gotta do it! It’s very scary and very exciting at the same time. And it was kind of a personal thing for me, as well. I certainly felt a connection to that, and it was just something that I felt like I needed to express.”
This is reflected in the lyrics. The narrator talks about having a doctor advise hiding his anxiety, saying, “You can make it in your disguise / Just never show the fear that’s in your eyes”. Then, he describes wanting to feel it all again once it’s over: “He got caught in the spotlight / When we get to the end / He wants to start all over again”.
While these fears can and certainly do hold some people back, they can also be a catalyst for chasing greatness, which, in this case, was standing on stage and giving “it all his might”.
