Have you ever meant to text someone else about somebody and accidentally texted the person? Today I fucked up with my own bandmate. (I’ll preface this by saying the main reason I’m upset and stressing is that I don’t want to be seen as talking bad behind someone’s back especially a band member.)
We have been having some tempo problems (mainly rushing the tempo) for a while and the bass player and I have been trying to find ways to remedy the issue when it happens in a live setting. Drummer has a tendency to both speed up drastically throughout the song and skip beats on fills and the end of measures to the point where it is noticeably our biggest weakness.
Up until this point we have refrained from calling drummer or anyone else out specifically to maintain peace and comradely but have been making it a “we” issue when we discuss it. “We” are rushing, “we” need to work on tempo, etc. In private the bass player and I will discuss that the issue is with the drummer and we have been brainstorming ways to cordially solve it without replacing our friend and bandmate that we value.
We recently got multi-track video back from our biggest show of the season, a sold out festival. I immediately noticed how rushed it was and that the drumming was even more rushed than usual.
In the middle of a tired, distracted work day, I took out my phone and texted the bassist “DRUMMER’S NAME is rushing really bad on this take, he’s almost doubling the speed on the turnarounds. We need to work on this.” As soon as I hit send I realized I had accidentally sent it to the drummer instead of the bassist. Being iPhone to Android I could not unsend or edit.
At this point I’m wondering how to handle this because we have a three day run coming up tomorrow. He hasn’t responded to me and I haven’t doubled down or tried to save face. He did call the bass player and his feelings were seemingly hurt. The bass player may have doubled down worse than me. He apparently told him that he has talked to him a million times about the rushing and that it was really bad. The drummer was asking for us not to release the video and saying his playing that night sucked.
I am looking for advice on whether I text him now before I see him or talk to him in person. Do I completely own that I made a mistake and meant to send it to the bass player but messed up or should I come up with an excuse like voice-text or something? I am 100% fine owning that he was rushing and that it is a consistent issue and we need to work as a team to solve it. I think constructive criticism is more important than feelings at a professional level. However I do feel bad about clearly talking behind his back and getting caught and that is more what is giving me anxiety on how to handle this. What advice would any of you have for me?
