Ava DiFiore and the Soft Case

I was backstage at a club Saturday night. A little place in some highway town in Pennsylvania. My friend, Chris, was playing. I was there to take pictures during his show but mostly to see him and give him some company.

By the time I got to the club, soundcheck was already over and the performance space was empty. Friendly but harried staff were scurrying about attending to last-minute things. That is pretty standard regardless of venue. At smaller clubs though, there is always a certain, specific kind of nervous freneticism in the air before shows. Saturday was no exception.

A few years ago, I couldn’t have told you that. Before COVID, I had been backstage a grand total of once in my life. Now I’ve shot a bunch of shows as a photographer and been backstage bunch. It’s been fun and interesting… and a learning experience.

The first few times I was backstage, as someone who knew absolutely nothing at all about how one is supposed to act in that situation, I filled in the blanks with a complete confidence that any movement at all would reveal me to be a tremendous idiot. Like, cataclysmically... embarrassingly. A spotlight would appear from nowhere... a voice would come over a PA system… and everyone in the vicinity would turn, incredulous, aghast, that someone had apparently eaten a few of the grapes from the snack table which EVERYONE KNOWS are The Grapes Never to be Eaten.

I was nervous, man. Probably palpably, visibly.  I did a fair amount of sweating.

When I was backstage and there were people around, I did my best to just not exhibit any sign of life. I stood on the perimeter and stayed very still so as to not expose that I was not, in fact, a potted plant. When everyone cleared out (as they usually did between the soundcheck and show) I would sink into the sofa for a few minutes maybe... but the second someone came back, I went right back to making myself thin.

With a little tape, I could have been a poster.

I felt uncomfortable. Out of place. I don’t anymore. Now it is all just familiar, comfortable.

On Saturday, there was someone backstage for whom that clearly wasn’t the case.

A young woman. She looked young… Early 20’s maybe? Young. She looked the way I imagine I did my first couple of times backstage. Nervous, tense. If she could have rendered herself invisible, I think she probably would have.

On one side of the room was a sitting area set comprised of a big, comfortable chair and an old, weathered, leather sofa. The nervous-looking person was sitting in neither. Instead, she was pressed up against the far wall sitting in one of those barely comfortable chairs hotels wheel in, unstack, and set ten to the table for banquets.

After saying hello to Chris, she and I made eye contact. I introduced myself with a “Hi, I’m Mike.” She returned a “Hi, I’m Ava.” And then I set my bag down and sunk into the sofa to get my camera gear out and ready while she sat stiffly up against the opposite wall.

In the space between the two of us, my friend, Chris, paced about with his guitar alternating between playing brief snippets of songs and making notes on a piece of paper. He had been through a rough prior week. His vocal cords were being a little cranky, so he was working on rearranging his set list to limit further strain.

While he and I each got ready, the two of us chatted a little but in the way people tend to backstage before a show:  Abbreviated exchanges rather than conversations. Clipped chatter.

Meanwhile, silent in her chair just radiating nervousness sat Ava, a guitar case leaning up against the wall behind her.

Now, here is where I need to interject with something.

In theory, I am a writer. Writing is my occupation. It is my livelihood and only source of income. It is what I tell people I do - albeit not entirely comfortably.

Asked to fill out a form with a box for occupation, I would scribble in ‘Writer’.

There is a bit of a rub for me in the capital ‘W’ version. It implies the act of writing is either the whole pie or the biggest slice - the most important one, the definitive one. It suggests the thing that I am good at or do or do differently than a writer with a lowercase ‘w’ is the writing… and that my be entirely the case for other writers. I just don’t think it is for me.

I think, more than a writer, I am a noticer.

I notice things. Small, extraneous, seemingly inconsequential things which I know most people look right past. Pictures over a cash register... Someone’s body language when they first walk into a bar... Not the things you can’t help but notice like someone’s tattoos, but instead something smaller like the color and crispness of the one on their forearm versus the one on their shoulder. In the answer is a history.

I just register passing things sometimes…

I have a sensitivity to cues which I know is more acute than typical. It is calibrated for faint signals. I know exactly where it comes from. It isn’t a mystery. It is a byproduct of childhood hypervigilance. I developed a heightened sensitivity to signals which then wired in place as just part of the machinery.

As an adult, while I could have done without how I came to have that wiring, I like having it. I like the sensitivity and having it programmed in. It has its downsides but, overall, I think it makes my experience of life richer.

Being a Noticer once saved me; now it serves me.

It doesn’t attune me to every little thing. It attunes me to a specific kind of thing, a gemstone tiny and crystalline with facets which work just like a diamond’s. They reflect light from many angles up through the crown so it twinkles. I register little things which are rich in explanation.

On Saturday, as Ava sit stiffly against the far wall, beside her was a guitar case.

I noticed.

I didn’t stare at it. I just noticed it. My kind of ‘notice’. A conscious registering and then subconscious processing of meaning and message.

The case was the soft, padded kind rather than the cliché hard kind that lone troubadours carry onto Greyhound buses in old movies.

Ava’s was shaped to fit an acoustic guitar. It had a main compartment which opened via a zipper that went almost all the way around so the top panel could be flipped all the way back revealing the entire guitar. On the back of the case were straps like a backpack. On the front were an array of pockets.

Ava’s case was gray rather than the usual black, and looked like it had gotten around. Not enough to be all the worse for it. Worn not worn out. Used often, used a lot.

In one of the pockets was something soft. A guitar cloth? A t-shirt? Something from another night stuffed quickly in a pocket while packing up? Whatever it was, it made the pocket bulge where the fabric and seams would allow, the Velcro flap barely closed.

I just glanced at the case and then went back to my camera and its settings. In the background, my inner noticer did its thing and read the light through the crown and that was enough to know some things.

I knew Ava’s guitar gets around with her. If she is in the car, so is that case. She knows every pocket in it. She knows their contents - because she uses every one and there is a system to how she does. She could tell you what is in each by heart. At least a couple are filled with things not musical at all because her guitar isn’t a ‘performance instrument’ and that isn’t a performance case. It is a companion so regular and constant, it is almost an extension, an attachment.

She probably has a hard case at home. She probably got it when she first got the guitar. It looks more serious, polished, official.

She has never used it and she never will.

That soft case exists because it is what a person wants when the thing they care most about is having the thing inside it with them almost all of the time.

That case is to Ava what my backpack - laptop in one pocket, camera in another – is to me. Something so familiar, so constant a companion, it feels weird, naked, uncomfortable to not have it at least in the car.

She brings it places just in case.

You don’t come to have a guitar case that telegraphs all that Ava’s did from just the ordinary wear of owning a guitar and playing it and maybe performing sometimes. You come to have it through your emotional energy, what you emit and transmit. You imbue a glint strong enough for me to notice by music being the place you go when you are at your worst… your most hurt… your most alone. By that guitar being the thing you pick up when it is all too much. By it being the thing you turn to when you are lost, and the thing that helps you find your way out.

(I went on tour for a week last winter with my friend, Chris, and I couldn’t tell you a thing about his guitar cases other than that one was a black soft case. I only remember even that much because I carried it a couple times, and I rode in the back seat with the guitars for close to a thousand miles.)

It isn’t that Ava’s case was actually distinctive or stood out in any way at all. It wasn’t. It didn’t. It just communicated at a wavelength I’m attuned to notice.

Along with her own energy, it shed light.

Ava has a lot invested in music emotionally. She was radiating nervousness because, while walking onstage can always be nerve wracking, it is a whole ‘nother level of fraught when walking out into a spotlight carrying something dear to you in the dark.

Caring raises the stakes. It adds risk. Emotional risk. Ava radiated caring a whole damn lot and the nervousness that comes with it.

I had no idea whether she was good. I wasn’t sure she was actually even the opener. I hadn’t known there might even be one. But there she was backstage with a guitar case, so I just assumed…

And then someone from the venue came in, looked at her, and said “Ready?”

Ava said yes and stood up. Then she took a deep breath; let it out; and then walked out through a heavy curtain onto a bright stage hidden behind it.

From backstage, Chris and I could hear only a muffled intro and then light applause from a crowd still filtering in. Then came the sound of an acoustic guitar being strummed in one final soundcheck followed by the muffled sound of Ava introducing herself.

She opened her set with “Me and Bobby McGee” and within a bar I was singing along.

Then she rolled into another song… and then another… just knocking it out of the park on each.

Chris and I just looked at each other like “Hooooly shit! Are you hearing this?!”

After a few songs, I walked around to the back of the club to catch the end of Ava’s set from the crowd.

She was great. I just sat in a seat watching mostly to just be happy for her. Other people’s joy is a helluva drug.

Once Ava finished, she came back to the backstage room just shining like a new dime from the rush that comes from having done the thing. Radiating now was the relief, the joy of having been good and knowing it.

Chris was effusive in praise and so was I. Ava, nerves long gone, was relaxed to talk. She and I chatted while Chris made his last preparations and then went on to start his set.

She’s 19. Piano was her first instrument. She taught herself guitar. This is what she wants to do. She has no doubts about that. She is trying to perform as much as she can - four times this week. She has that fire…

Some people tell her she should be in school or should go get a stable job. “I just think, I’m young. If I don’t try now, when will I ever?”

I told her what I tell everyone regardless of age when talking about situations where on one side is something they want, on the other is cost and consequence, and between them is risk of failure:

Failure is light; regret is heavy.

Having tried but not succeeded at something rests pretty lightly on people’s shoulders. More lightly than they would have expected. Regret though… regret is a bag of anvils. Go towards your passion not away from your fear. Don’t live in fear that it won’t work out. You will be fine even if it doesn’t.

After a few minutes, I went out and shot Chris’ set and got some decent pictures. Afterwards, he and I crashed in hotel rooms the venue picked up for us. We both went straight to bed. It was late. We were both tired.

The next morning, I got up and left straightaway to get my son. On the ride home, I pulled up Ava’s Instagram page and listened to every video she has posted. They are mostly covers of popular songs. Among them was one clip of an original song, something she wrote. It is the clip I have now come back to her feed to replay a few times since.

With the dust now settled from Saturday’s show and having now heard some of her other stuff, I decided I am going to reach out to her. Just a friendly outreach to say it was nice meeting her coupled with an offer to share thoughts on building her following, etc., if that is of any interest. If it is, great. If not, no problem.

In preparation for potentially talking, I’ve been thinking about what I would say… and in that, hearing my own advice.

The thrust of my message would be that while it’s just fine to play other people’s songs, the most valuable thing she can bring to the world is herself. Her own feelings. She has the voice, passion, and drive. The one thing left to add is herself. The things she feels most deeply? Those are her songs. If she feels them, so will other people…

I have no idea whether she and I will actually end up talking… but regardless, I think the prep exercise was just what I needed for me.

On Saturday, before heading Chris’ show, - literally right before getting in the car - I posted a long two-parter that I then quickly and awkwardly took right back down. I just suddenly… hated it. I don’t have a one- or two-sentence explanation as to why. I just hated it in a way that made me so uncomfortable leaving it up that I pulled over in some darkened parking lot in the middle of nowhere and took it down.

Having now thought about it and also heard my own potential advice to Ava, I think I can offer an explanation:

It wasn’t what I want to bring of myself. It wasn’t my music.

It wasn’t solely the writing per se. If it were, I would have just edited the hell out of it and chopped it way down to a reasonable one-parter. It was that I wrote it as a product not as exposure of the person writing it.

What I really wanted was to share what has captivated my interest and energy and time for much of these past two weeks: the whole rabbit hole that started with me pulling over on the side of a road curious about an abandoned barn.

The idea of writing something that tracked to the actual sequence events – meaning, my own little crazy spiral - felt very me but not at all everyone else. So, I dismissed the ride-along and decided to excerpt a standalone story. But writing it felt inorganic and taxing. It took forever. The resulting writing felt ponderous and dense and unenjoyable.

I feel like I am at my best when I am writing with a light fluidity as if I were talking to someone as we walked comfortably on a path or beach or boardwalk. A sort of walking meditation to be read out loud at their pace. Words as music with a cadence and rhythm.

My two-parter was not at all that.

What I wanted to write felt too me. So, I abandoned it. And then promptly hated it so much, I didn’t want it to be part of my record.

The advice I would give Ava is to put herself in her music. I’ve had a hard time understanding that myself lately.

I need to be in the music.

I think the most valuable thing you can bring to the world is yourself.

I am a Noticer. That is what I am. It is who I am. I am a noticer who writes.

I’m sorry for my aborted posts this weekend. While I know this likely won’t make sense to some, what I bring matters to me. It represents me. It is my music. It doesn’t have to be a hit. It just has to be mine.

I have really struggled lately with finding my own center. It is this. It is here.

As for Ava, you can find her on Instagram at (@)avadifioremusic. She’s got that fire. I’m rooting for her.

You can find her here:

avadifioremusic

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