Sometimes it’s a little embarrassing to hear my own music in a public situation. Maybe kind of like parents showing people your baby photos? And I also tend to ‘get over’ my older songs and move on to the new fairly quickly. But today I re-discovered my uptempo alt-country song “Dig,” and I’m only a little embarrassed to admit that I am rocking out to it right now. You can too if you like.
Recently, every time I’ve sat down with my guitar I start writing. Which is great, it’s not getting me any closer to having my live set together. Today I had to kick my butt into gear, so I rented a rehearsal space for a couple hours at nearby Exposition Studios (which I recommend – nice guys over there!).
I’m getting ready for a crazy springtime combination of NACA conferences, college shows, and then shows at clubs and churches and coffeehouses. Not to say that my shows in the past have been thrown together, but before I started using a looper pedal it was a bit simpler to put together a set. It’s, you know, don’t do three ballads in a row (or even two, really). Don’t play a bunch of songs in the same key or with the exact same rhythmic feel.
Now that I have the looper as a resource, there are more and somehow fewer possibilities. On the one hand, I can do an a cappella song with a whole bunch of harmonies (yay, working on this) but I also need to vary the way I create the background for each song so it doesn’t get monotonous. I might want to vary looper and non-looper songs, so the order has to be really set in advance. Some shows I need to do lots of covers, some none. Suffice it to say I’m putting a lot of thought into each iteration of my set, but that feels good. I have a ways to go, but I really feel like I will not just be playing songs now, I’ll be putting on a show!