So there I was minding my own business when Sam put out a call to arms for everybody he knows to come down to the Robin 2 once again for his open mic night. Well, I can't turn down an offer like that...
I got four songs this time, rather than three, so I began with Get Out Of My Head. This didn't go too badly at all, I made one daft mistake with the chords playing Em when it should have been E, but if that's the worst thing I did all gig then I'm not doing too badly at all. The rest of it was note perfect, and I'm beginning to appreciate the value of this song as a 'warm-up' piece, if I haven't been playing any substantial amount of guitar all day it's useful to play this one before all the fast strumming of my other songs kick in.
Sam had earlier told me that he'd compiled a CD of songs that he'd recorded from the sessions he'd done, and that the song he'd used from my session was Storm from the North, so naturally I felt compelled to play it! One of the regulars from the Woodman who hadn't seen me for a while said that it was the first time he'd actually been able to listen to the lyrics, and that he thought it was really good and that was the best he'd ever seen me. Well, as far as compliments go, that's about as good as it gets, so thanks! I do enjoy playing that one actually, the different verse structures makes it a bit different from my usual songs and feels less like I'm going through the motions. Impossible to think that about a song when you write it, but I think I struck gold with that one!
Then I had a go at Because The Night by Patti Smith, preceded by an explaination to having to drop £800 on reparing my car over the last few weeks which was loosely relevant to Bruce Springsteen, who sings about cars, and also did a version of Because The Night so it's a long way round but I did move in the direction of relevance in the end. I'm playing this a lot better these days, though I still have to concentrate. It's another of the songs I do that's popular but not covered all that often, so when people hear it they think 'Wow, I haven't heard this for ages!' and if they grew up with that style of music - which in many cases they did - then so much the better. This one's a keeper!
I ended of course with Bitterness, expecting and in fact fully intending to break my G-string along the way, much to the amusement of the crowd. It's always the G string for some reason. What's actually happening is that the brass winding around the string is coming off at around about the second fret of my guitar. Any day now... The string survived, and I put the ever-increasing amount of venom into that song to make the required amount of impact.
All in all, I think I did quite well here! A really good night and I enjoyed it, tired though I was!
Saturday 25 February 2012
Thursday 9 February 2012
Classic Set at Katies, 8/2/2012
This was a turn-up for the books that came to me in the middle of the day, and gave me another chance to flex my singing muscles in front of what turned out to be quite a substantial crowd at Katies tonight!
I began with something I hadn't done in a while and started the show with the Get Out Of My Head and Bitterness combo. I'd forgotten how well those two songs played together worked! The former was as good as it needed to be and my performances of Bitterness are getting ever-more visceral; all in all not a bad start.
Feeling a need for a change in mood but not wanting to reduce the pace by very much, I then went ahead and played A Little Respect. I definitely clocked some people singing along to it this time! Funny how one well-chosen 80s classic can become such an intergral part of my set-list. Nitpicking now, but the Bflat bit with the guitar solo in there could use a little tidying up, it's rare that I don't hit the A string with that so either need to play it as a barre chord or be very careful where I'm strumming.
Naturally I was exhausted by then, so I kept the opening refrain of Storm from the North going for as long as I could get away with. It's funny, thinking about it now, how the classic set seems to be coming back around on itself and I'm putting this song back in the middle once again. There was some definite attetion going through the whole show, so all I had to do was keep it up...
I more or less managed it with A Lonely Night, which is new enough not to have become part of the 'classic' set yet. However I did stop concentrating in the second verse and sang half of the first by mistake; stupid and I shouldn't have let it happen but I doubt anybody would notice. As far as I knew, it was only Dave and Sam who had heard it before!
I then played my second cover of the evening, My Girl by whoever wrote it (I'm most familiar with the Otis Redding version, believe it or not...) This turned out to be rather a poor choice of song, as rather than remain engaged, most of the people in the room disappeared out the back for a cigarrette. So I probably won't play it at Katies again, though I won't write it off comepletely; I'm sure in the right spirit and in front of the right audience it would go down as well as you would expect a song of that calibre!
I finished off, of course, with We Will Survive. Again with the classic intro ressurected! It felt really good to be playing the old set again, which is saying something because it became quite stagant towards the middle of last year.
I remember when I was in Crashpoint, and we'd lost Jay out the band, and Emma for some reason was trying to slow the whole pace of the music down to something far slower and more methodical than the raw fury we'd been making our staple sound up to that point. I reckon that if we'd ever have done We Will Survive in the band, (not entirely implausible, as I wrote it just as the band was coming together,) Emma would have gone for the slower version. It's nice to do something a bit different every now and then - but I'm not forgetting what my songs originally sounded like! Funnily enough, the fact that I rarely play to the same audience twice these days makes me think that doing slight variations in my own songs is more for my entertainment as much as anybody elses, but it worked!
It's probably also the first time I've played a full gig at Katies for, like, ever and not played Girl's Names. Probably just as well. I don't want to play a song like that just because I feel compelled to. In fact that would probably be conducive to me playing something completely different!
Might be checking out a new open night tomorrow, see you soon!
Matt
I began with something I hadn't done in a while and started the show with the Get Out Of My Head and Bitterness combo. I'd forgotten how well those two songs played together worked! The former was as good as it needed to be and my performances of Bitterness are getting ever-more visceral; all in all not a bad start.
Feeling a need for a change in mood but not wanting to reduce the pace by very much, I then went ahead and played A Little Respect. I definitely clocked some people singing along to it this time! Funny how one well-chosen 80s classic can become such an intergral part of my set-list. Nitpicking now, but the Bflat bit with the guitar solo in there could use a little tidying up, it's rare that I don't hit the A string with that so either need to play it as a barre chord or be very careful where I'm strumming.
Naturally I was exhausted by then, so I kept the opening refrain of Storm from the North going for as long as I could get away with. It's funny, thinking about it now, how the classic set seems to be coming back around on itself and I'm putting this song back in the middle once again. There was some definite attetion going through the whole show, so all I had to do was keep it up...
I more or less managed it with A Lonely Night, which is new enough not to have become part of the 'classic' set yet. However I did stop concentrating in the second verse and sang half of the first by mistake; stupid and I shouldn't have let it happen but I doubt anybody would notice. As far as I knew, it was only Dave and Sam who had heard it before!
I then played my second cover of the evening, My Girl by whoever wrote it (I'm most familiar with the Otis Redding version, believe it or not...) This turned out to be rather a poor choice of song, as rather than remain engaged, most of the people in the room disappeared out the back for a cigarrette. So I probably won't play it at Katies again, though I won't write it off comepletely; I'm sure in the right spirit and in front of the right audience it would go down as well as you would expect a song of that calibre!
I finished off, of course, with We Will Survive. Again with the classic intro ressurected! It felt really good to be playing the old set again, which is saying something because it became quite stagant towards the middle of last year.
I remember when I was in Crashpoint, and we'd lost Jay out the band, and Emma for some reason was trying to slow the whole pace of the music down to something far slower and more methodical than the raw fury we'd been making our staple sound up to that point. I reckon that if we'd ever have done We Will Survive in the band, (not entirely implausible, as I wrote it just as the band was coming together,) Emma would have gone for the slower version. It's nice to do something a bit different every now and then - but I'm not forgetting what my songs originally sounded like! Funnily enough, the fact that I rarely play to the same audience twice these days makes me think that doing slight variations in my own songs is more for my entertainment as much as anybody elses, but it worked!
It's probably also the first time I've played a full gig at Katies for, like, ever and not played Girl's Names. Probably just as well. I don't want to play a song like that just because I feel compelled to. In fact that would probably be conducive to me playing something completely different!
Might be checking out a new open night tomorrow, see you soon!
Matt
Monday 6 February 2012
New Covers for January!
Didn't have a gig last week, for the first time since the summer. It gave me the opportunity to take a bit of a break and write a new song, though it will need some rehearsal before I play it live!
My new year's resolution for 2012 was to learn a new song every week. Reason for this is I'm really looking to increase the range of covers I can play, cater to all audiences, use the skills I've gained over the last couple of years to complement the songs I choose to play, and hopefully learn some new skills as well. So launching straight into open nights in the new year, I began...
I actually learned 2 in the first week. Patti Smith: Because The Night is a throwback to the Perception days, and I always liked the song so I decided to learn it. For some reason with this one I've found the lyrics really hard to get, but in front of the right audience it goes down well. I don't think it was a mistake to play it at the Maverick!
The other was Roxy Music: Do The Strand. This is one of the ones I learned when I was learning songs for the Roxy Music tribute act, Roxy Magic. Interestingly, I've tried to learn Oh Yeah before now, on several occasions... but as much as I like the song on the record, it's not all that interesting to play. Do The Strand, on the other hand, was a welcome challenge - there's a lot going on, and I had to work out what I was going to do with 6 strings and still be faithful to the song. I think I do alright! The lyrics are a little tough to remember but I've had a good run of playing this live so far so I reckon it's a keeper.
I was not in a good mood when I decided to learn Marilyn Manson: Coma Black. For that reason I haven't played it all that much since the week I learned it. As will all Marilyn Manson songs, it's murder on the throat! But as I've been listening to him for 12 years now, and that song for most of those years, I basically knew it already, and it was just a case of reminding myself of the chord sequences and a couple of the lyrics. Whether I'll ever play it live is anyone's guess.
I've been wanting to learn some Within Temptation since seeing them live, and I picked my favourite song off their most recent album: Sinead. It's got quite a bombastic disco-stomp chorus that can't really be done on an acoustic guitar, but the chords are not actually that hard. Not much of Within Temptation is to be honest; they're great musicians but the structure of the songs themselves is usually quite straightforward.
I decided to be lazy for the last week in January and learned another Within Temptation song: Shot In The Dark. This was even easier than Sinead to be honest, because the chords were even more straightforward. I've enjoyed playing it but I don't know where I'm going to be playing either of these songs live to be perfectly honest; Within Temptation are not exactly a commonly known band amongst the acoustic fraternity so I'll have to pick my spots carefully here.
So - another few songs added to my repertoire! Actually in the song that I've most recently written you can hear the Within Temptation influence. So the effect it's having on my songwriting is tangible so far.
Time will tell where I go with it...
My new year's resolution for 2012 was to learn a new song every week. Reason for this is I'm really looking to increase the range of covers I can play, cater to all audiences, use the skills I've gained over the last couple of years to complement the songs I choose to play, and hopefully learn some new skills as well. So launching straight into open nights in the new year, I began...
I actually learned 2 in the first week. Patti Smith: Because The Night is a throwback to the Perception days, and I always liked the song so I decided to learn it. For some reason with this one I've found the lyrics really hard to get, but in front of the right audience it goes down well. I don't think it was a mistake to play it at the Maverick!
The other was Roxy Music: Do The Strand. This is one of the ones I learned when I was learning songs for the Roxy Music tribute act, Roxy Magic. Interestingly, I've tried to learn Oh Yeah before now, on several occasions... but as much as I like the song on the record, it's not all that interesting to play. Do The Strand, on the other hand, was a welcome challenge - there's a lot going on, and I had to work out what I was going to do with 6 strings and still be faithful to the song. I think I do alright! The lyrics are a little tough to remember but I've had a good run of playing this live so far so I reckon it's a keeper.
I was not in a good mood when I decided to learn Marilyn Manson: Coma Black. For that reason I haven't played it all that much since the week I learned it. As will all Marilyn Manson songs, it's murder on the throat! But as I've been listening to him for 12 years now, and that song for most of those years, I basically knew it already, and it was just a case of reminding myself of the chord sequences and a couple of the lyrics. Whether I'll ever play it live is anyone's guess.
I've been wanting to learn some Within Temptation since seeing them live, and I picked my favourite song off their most recent album: Sinead. It's got quite a bombastic disco-stomp chorus that can't really be done on an acoustic guitar, but the chords are not actually that hard. Not much of Within Temptation is to be honest; they're great musicians but the structure of the songs themselves is usually quite straightforward.
I decided to be lazy for the last week in January and learned another Within Temptation song: Shot In The Dark. This was even easier than Sinead to be honest, because the chords were even more straightforward. I've enjoyed playing it but I don't know where I'm going to be playing either of these songs live to be perfectly honest; Within Temptation are not exactly a commonly known band amongst the acoustic fraternity so I'll have to pick my spots carefully here.
So - another few songs added to my repertoire! Actually in the song that I've most recently written you can hear the Within Temptation influence. So the effect it's having on my songwriting is tangible so far.
Time will tell where I go with it...
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