Why drummers are my Deep Work heroes

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I recently finished reading DEEP WORK by Cal Newport. Cal’s book mainly focuses on smart strategies and techniques for making you more focused and productive in a work context. His very readable book is also highly relevant if you are interested in learning, or instructional design.  While reading, I imagined Cal has one of those rich deep voices used for big budget action movie trailers (clears throat); “Deep work is necessary to wring every last drop of value out of your current intellectual capacity.”  If that sounds a bit ominous and over the top, he helpfully puts it more simply this way; “To learn hard things quickly, you must focus intensely without distraction.  To learn, in other words, is an act of deep work.” 

Cal explains the profound value that can be found when you create space and distraction-free time for ‘deep work’.  His argument goes something like this: deep work is hard, therefore it is rare, and such scarcity is highly valuable; so, if you become accomplished at deep work, your personal value will be enhanced exponentially. The problem is that in the twenty-first century, we are wired 24-hours a day to be actively distracted, allowing us little room for depth. The act of ‘carving out’ time for deep work is a tough undertaking in itself, which needs planning, discipline and much determination.

Cal cites a few examples of Deep Work in action; Bill Gates writing the first code for Windows, Mark Twain writing Tom Sawyer in a remote shed, Woody Allen producing 44 screenplays in 47 years (using the same Olympia SM3 manual typewriter); JK Rowling holed up in a suite of a smart hotel, writing the seventh Harry Potter book; prolific science-fiction writer Neal Stephenson’s habitual aversion to the black hole that is social media. Cal’s thesis reminded me a lot of Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, where he tells the stories of extraordinary personal achievement; from rock stars to professional athletes, software billionaires and scientific geniuses.  There are many factors behind their success, but he argues that the common denominator was not talent, or innate ability, or intelligence; but actual time invested: often 10,000 hours, or more, of absolute dedication to a craft. As my Yorkshire heritage might have described it: great talent knows how to put a shift in. Gladwell’s most famous example is The Beatles, who performed live in Hamburg over 1,200 times from 1960 to 1964, amassing more than 10,000 hours of playing time; laying the foundations in their craftsmanship for the masterpiece recordings later in their career.

While reading Cal’s book, I was, inappropriately enough, distracted by a few articles and a couple of new tribute videos to the Canadian drummer Neil Peart, who sadly passed away in early 2020. For over 40 years, Peart was the drummer in the band Rush, and according to many music writers, fellow rock musicians and, probably most importantly, almost all drummers who have ever held a stick, Peart is regarded as the greatest rock drummer in history. 

Now drummers often get an unfair press; an image is often conjured of the crazy drum beater; Animal in the muppets, the self-combusting drummer in Spinal Tap, Keith Moon of The Who driving a Rolls Royce into his swimming pool.  You know the drill?  The crazy guy at the back, who hits things. But dig deeper, as Cal suggests, and some of the most extraordinary creativity ever gifted to the world came from drummers.  Even Ringo Starr does not get the accolades afforded to John, Paul and George, but listen to his craft in A Day In the Life and imagine anyone else making those fills with such perfect touch and feel.  Phil Collins is remembered more for being the guy at the back who moved up to be the front man, replacing Peter Gabriel and then becoming a 1980s platinum shifting solo star. Some might associate him with a thunderous drum fill used for Cadbury’s chocolate ad, played by a moody Gorilla.  But again, dig deeper, and take a few minutes to listen to Collins playing the ‘Apocalypse in 9/8’ segment of Supper’s Ready from the Genesis album of 1973 and there is simply nothing like it in rock music, ever.  It’s technically difficult to play (clue in the name) but his execution and flair around that awkward tempo is also uncannily brilliant. Collins’ now fronts shows while seated; his 50,000+ hours of dedication to his craft has been quite literally back breaking.  In more recent years, Dave Grohl has stepped out from the drum-stool shadows of Nirvana, to front The Foo Fighters, and make them the biggest rock band in the world. During lockdown, he also enhanced his reputation as the nicest (f***ing!) guy in rock, by bravely taking on an online drum challenge from Nandi Bushell, a ten-year old prodigy from the UK. These are the people I think of when I feel drummers get a bad press.  

But what about Neil Peart? What was it about this humble man from Ontario, Canada, whom they called The Professor? For me, Peart was the archetypal Deep Work drummer.  He developed his craft in extraordinary ways; as the thunderous bedrock of a rock trio, he was renowned for his technical proficiency and his live performances for their exacting nature and stamina. He played thousands of shows, touring the world supporting nineteen studio albums and selling more than 10 million albums in the US alone. In the same rock n roll era of sex, drugs and throwing TV sets out of hotel windows, Peart was also the band’s lyricist, infusing sophisticated compositions with musings on science fiction, fantasy, ancient philosophy, as well as exploring humanitarian and libertarian themes.  He wrote seven novels, as well as evocative travel memoirs. His appetite for learning, creativity and literature was rapacious: “I can honestly say I have never been bored for one-second of my life, because I have always found another way not to be.” 

So far, impressive, but he went further.  In 1994, Peart became a friend and pupil of jazz instructor Freddie Gruber.  It was during this time that Peart decided to wholly revamp his playing style by incorporating jazz and swing components.  The greatest rock drummer in the world stripped back three decades of hard earned technical prowess and began again, re-learning rudiments, adopting a different stick hold and re-exploring expression and-time keeping. He took his playing not just to another level, but to a different place.  He humbly described himself as “having a nack” for drumming, but puts his subsequent extraordinary performances down to “determination”; an obsessive application of theory and practice and practice and practice. There are a number of ways this could be illustrated and YouTube is full of his performances with Rush, but my starting place would be a show he did for The Buddy Rich Big Band, a short clip from a drum solo from 1994 [see below]

To paraphrase Cal Newport, what you will see in Neil Peart’s craft is an example of a life fully immersed in deep work; and as such, it’s rare, precious and full of joy.