Hi there. As promised...
I said I'd be at Sam's open night when I saw him on his birthday, and I'm not one to go back on my word; this was the night I hoped to play Storm From The North for the first time. I did play it... but actually debuted it at Katies the previous night, as I've already explained.
At open mics like this, especially this one where I hae a certain level of friendly familiarity with the regulars, I can afford to chop and change my set around a little bit so I started with Girl's Names. I played it fine and it went down as well as ever; a little uninspired for a set opener but to be honest I really didn't feel like playing We Will Survive tonight so I went for a way to leave it out of the 4 songs I've got in the time frame.
Next was Get Out Of My Head. I introduced it as the "I forgot my capo" song (a cheeky reference to when I've gone to Sam's open night before and forgot my capo, this song being the only one of my own songs I could therefore play) but I actually played it because I didn't get around to playing it at Sam's birthday last week and I hadn't gorgotten Kayla asking for it! So that one was for her, though to be fair I like playing it too.
Then I played Storm from the North. I announced that I had a new song and went straight in to it, and it went down really well. I know this because Sam confirmed it at the end of my set, Glenn from Under the Banner was trying to figure out my time signatures in the quiet parts (for the record it's one bar of 9/8 and one bar of 12/8) and some of the regular guys told me afterwards that 'That Sea Shanty One' was reallly good. I'm very pleased with this, I put a lot of work in to making sure that song was perfect before I played it live and I'm delighted it went down so well.
I went straight into Bitterness after that, reasoning that I might as well go out with a bang! I played it well enough, however I've played that song so many times now to these guys that I guess the real novelty of it was when I break it down into the bassline and make a joke while I'm playing. In this case, I mentioned that it's always easy to tell who plays drums in the audience because they're tapping along to the songs that I'm playing...
I got talking to Ed and some of the regulars afterwards who seem to think I've got something special going on. Ed in particular likes Dear Mr Manager, a generous thing to say considering I hadn't played it there in a month! And the whole acoustic thing seems to be working for me right now. Thinking about why that is, I guess it's because I'm basically playing rock songs on an acoustic guitar. That's not actually as common as it sounds. Some guys might do acoustic covers of rock songs, I seem to be writing rock songs specifically to play them on acoustic guitar.
Why? Well, to be honest, the only reason I'm playing the acoustic guitar so much these days is because I can't seem to hold it together with a band. Given the choice, I'd much rather be rocking out with the band, it's just that getting one together seems to be almost impossible for me at this point! And I don't listen to a lot of acoustic music either. But these things work to my benefit, because a fondness for modern rock and no pre-conceived idea of how acoustic music is supposed to sound means that what I come up with sits somewhere between the two, which for a great many people I guess is a refreshing change.
Which is good because things aren't looking all that great for either of my bands right now; The Fakes have kept it together for 7 years but with only 5 gigs to show for it one could hardly accuse us of taking it seriously. Perception... it's hard to keep up the enthusiasm for that band when we've never had a complete lineup we've been able to hold on to for more than a couple of weeks in the year we've been together. I did actually think about getting Crashpoint back together, but as that would only count for me and Cj in this day and age, we'd hardly be the band we quit a year ago.
But the momentum's rolling, and for now at least, I'm enjoying it...
10,000 hours: stick in there!!
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