The Fear and Triumph of Building a New Show

I did a concert at Boulevard Music in Culver City last Saturday night.    It was a CD release concert and instead of doing the show that I’ve been working on for the past few years, I did a completely different show.   

Let me preface this by saying that in the years previously I had decided to really hone my act and put together a set that would be like a theatre piece.    I chose all the songs from my then latest CD, The Eternal Contradiction, and I wove a series of anecdotes around them.    Then I did the show over  and over and kept editing the dialog and the vocals and guitar arrangements until I had what I considered a perfect set.     You never get there, but you always shoot for it.

What does happen when you do that is you get comfortable as you know everything that you are going to be doing, saying, singing, etc. but Saturday night I was doing all new songs from a brand new CD and I’d never performed most of them in front of anyone before.

Usually, the songs all evolve over time and then are recorded but this CD turned out to be all new songs that I was writing all at once and I only had done two of them on stage in front of an audience before.

To do a completely new show, all new songs, and have no idea what kind of dialog is going to even show up is scary, thrilling and, the only way to grow as an artist.

Regarding the dialog, I don’t write it out.   I talk and what works I mostly remember and what doesn’t work I definitely remember and don’t go there again.  

From years and  years of being on the road, I have found that I write my best between song dialog right there on stage off the top of my head.   The pieces that I’ve written before hand sound like me trying to remember what I wrote instead of just rolling with it, like a guitar player would take a solo during a jam.   Just start riffing and see what happens.

But it’s all worked out on stage, so Saturday night I had nothing worked out but the rehearsal of the songs.

I tried to play each of them every day a couple of times in the weeks before the show, so that my practice sessions became singing the entire Backstage at the Resurrection CD and then I’d work on anything else.

But the difference between the second set (where in a did songs over which I had complete authority and much of the songs from The Eternal Contradiction) and the first set was remarkable and, to me, obvious.

It turns out that you never practice as much as you should.   I mean I did a fine show and everyone loved it and I sold a lot of CD’s, but it wasn’t like the second set.   The second set was all songs that I KNEW how to deliver.

Now it’s possible the first set was more entertaining to the audience because it was all live, on the fly, seeing what would happen, as opposed to the complete ownership of the songs that I demonstrated in the second set.

There are, of course, many schools of thought on what should be presented and how.  

I believe that the show should appear effortless and fun, even if you know ever word and every note of what’s coming, you should present it in a spontaneous and joyous manner.   They shouldn’t know that you’ve done this many times before.   They should feel like it is simply unfolding the way a sunrise does.   The same thing every day and different every time.

And the fact remains, for me, that I must do them on stage, in front of an audience, many many times before I own them.   So I play out as much as I can and when I’m off the road, I go to clubs and I sit in whenever I can and I do these songs.   

The trap is, if you go on stage, you want to bring out your heaviest gun, but if you are working up new material you must do that as well, so when sitting in, choose a new thing or two and then close with something that you own, that you do better than anything else you do, that way you leave them with a great taste in their ears.