Someone I consider a dear friend, and mega-talented musician, once collaborated with Taylor Swift.
Being a fan of their music, and sharing a number of mutual friends, we got to know each other online and, to this day, I've never actually met this person in real-life. Does that make our friendship any less credible? I don't know. I will say that this person knows a few things about me that few of my real-life friends know simply because this person is the only one who's ever asked.
In that sense, it's kind of weird that you can achieve a meaningful connection with someone you've never actually met, whose voice you've never heard. In a way, it is the proverbial pen-pal paradigm taken to sci-fi extremes. In other words, a conversation that would have taken weeks via snail mail can play out in real time.
Some find the idea of such friendships cold or lacking, but, at the end of the day, if you close your laptop or chuck your phone onto the counter feeling that someone out there "gets you", how cold or lacking can it really be?
Speaking of "cold and lacking", when asked what it was like working with Ms. Swift (come on, you'd ask too if you were me), my friend replied "We've actually never met."
Even so, my friend's royalty checks cash just the same.
In Rhett Miller's recent contribution to The Baffler issue No. 37 (which you should definitely READ), the Old '97s leader mourns the sacrifice of creativity via the "real human connection" of people gathering in the same room, and, while this writer fully agrees, there is something to be said for the "long-distance romance" aspect of creation that existed long before high-speed internet made it feasible to send entire project files to collaborators anywhere in the world in the click of a mouse.
The most obvious example would be the snail-mail collaboration between Death Cab's Ben Gibbard and Dntel's Jimmy Tamborello that led to the 2003 release of The Postal Service's Give Up. As legend has it, the pair hadn't even met by the time they began rehearsals for the first Postal Service tour.
Whether that is true or not, these days, it seems more possible than ever for a band's entire existence to take place without the band members ever needing to be in the same room. While some might consider this idea disingenuous to the "all for one and one for all" creative process of multiple musicians gathered in the same room, those quick to romanticize such organic, face-to-face endeavors of yore conveniently forget the hours and hours of in-person collaboration that either yielded absolutely nothing or material that may have initially floored us, but was later left on the cutting room floor.
In that sense, there is something to be said for this new model of collaboration because of the ease with which we can be at our best instead of "being there" and merely hoping for the best.