Trevor Hall
February 26, 2007
@ Chaplins Music Cafe in Spring City
w/ The Red Chairs opening at 6:30 PM
Trevor @ 8 PM
All The Right Words
by Chris March
Sometimes people struggle finding the right words to say. Granted, there are an awful lot of words to choose from, which explains why there are also those who never shut up. And of course, not everyone speaks the same language either.
But then there is music.
Everyone has a song that spoke to them strongly or said the right words at the right time. Sometimes a two-minute pop ditty can convey the indescribable emotions between a boy and a girl with frightening precision. Music can also encourage a teenager to grow his hair long and pick up a guitar. Still, most music comes with its own barriers since lyrics are just more use of language. But then there are instrumental artists like Trevor Hall who take mighty steps over these barriers without so much as a word.
The 21-year old Douglassville native had just arrived home from George’s Music in Spring City where he works when he phoned in to chat with Time Out about his upcoming show at Chaplin’s this Monday.
“All throughout history, instrumental music has been a big thing,” said the guitarist. “But it hasn’t been as big in recent years, so my hope is to bring that back. I want this to be a successful show so people realize that instrumental music is a very beautiful thing and that it is still very accessible to the common person.”
But the common person does not know a guitar the way Hall does. He has wielded the six-string since he built one with wood and some fishing line at age 10. He has since moved on to a more professional-looking acoustic, but his hunger for the instrument remains as strong. And it does not take long to notice music is the lens which he sees life through. He talks with great fervor over the phone about what music can represent to people and how songs don’t need words to be expressive.
“Music is a language and all language has to say something,” he said. “So I could sit around and study music as a science and try to figure out all the semantics of it, but if I have nothing to say, it’s pointless.”
He culls his songs from the walks he goes on, sitting by the river, visiting art galleries or by simply watching a movie. And this array of influence explains why his music is so colorfully descript and rich with influence.
"There’s something about taking a message or a frozen moment in time and putting that into a musical language that actually helps you take music into a new direction, because you’re not thinking about music. You’re thinking about something beyond music, and that music tends to be the language that gets you to that,” he said.
The 13 picturesque tracks of his self-released debut, “Portraits Of Imagination” unfold like a pop-up storybook that pulls listeners into its pages and saturates them with his world of guitar wizardry. Without lyrics, the songs are open to interpretation, but the mood evokes cascading landscapes and visceral sunsets which tell stories of their own. As the silent narrator, Hall bends each note and slides along each string with the same purpose a painter would with a brushstroke across a canvas.
And this experience is exactly what fans can expect from Hall on Monday, but in a more personal setting.
“Whatever I do on my albums, I always do live,” he said. “I try to do everything I can. And what I’ve been doing in my new compositions is trying to learn how to play it all together at one time, instead of looping.”
However he pulls off the complexity of his arrangements though, his performance will be sure to leave some speechless.
“I love [music] because it’s so versatile and there are so many different things you can do with it,” he said. “And that’s what is great about it, because you’re not limited by anything.”
Chris March - Pottstown Mercury