We write songs, you know, Annie & I. For the past year or so, Annie has been living opposite a bar called Revise, which holds a live "jam session" on Sunday nights. Open mic, all artists welcome, singers, musicians, original music, covers, whatever. A couple of weeks ago, she arranged with the organiser to let us do a short set of our own songs, live, backed by the resident house band.
I don't know what I expected. No, that's not true. I expected to have A BLAST. I've only sung through a professional PA once in my life: when we attended a Beach Boys fan club evening and they left the tribute band's PA up for us to sing karaoke through. That was *fab* so I expected, with a live band, it would be even better.
Annie had given copies of the original MP3s to the band early and being "proper" musicians they'd turned the music into real tabs and annotations for keyboard, lead and bass guitar and drums.
Despite writing the words for all our songs I've never performed them live, and in the case of the one I sang tonight - Dance of the Lonely Old Man - I hadn't looked at the lyrics since we'd recorded the album in the autumn of 2005, so I knew I needed to practice. And practice I did - about a hundred times over the past 3-4 days. In the car, in the garden, in the bath, until I was word perfect and had the timing down too.
Stepping up to the mic this evening I didn't *feel* nervous. I even managed a brief intro and told the audience what songs we would be singing without my voice audibly wobbling. 'Lonely Old Man' lends itself to a rolling introduction and this is what the band played behind my chatter, so as soon as I'd finished talking I waited for the next bar and launched right into the song, hoping they'd just pick it up. And they did - it worked really well - but after a few seconds I realised I was singing a lot higher than the band were playing. Sounded like half a tone to me (Annie said later she thought I was singing the harmony - three semi-tones higher than the melody) but whatever it was, it wasn't quite right, and with the monitor speaker out of action, I couldn't hear myself well enough to correct it.
The muscle memory of my days of practice carried me through - I remained consistently in (my) key throughout the rendition - and once I'd finished and sat down quite a few people congratulated me on the performance. Not being familiar with the song, it may have sounded OK to them: it didn't to me. Later a post-mortem with Annie revealed a further problem. The "perfectionist" band member, whom she'd assumed was a guitar player, turned out to be on keyboard. Great for her number - Home Town - which is mostly keyboard, but a disaster for Dance, for which the melody line is played on guitar. I'd effectively been struggling on with no monitor AND no melody and honestly? I'd been too hyped to notice.
Having had the chance to listen to the original track on our album again, I'm now convinced that I was in the right key, and it was the band who were too low, but whatever the truth and however it came about, the end result was not quite the perfect performing experience I'd hoped for, but with no opportunity to practice with the band beforehand, not entirely surprising.
I was pleased to have been able to sing the song through without a cheat sheet (I pinned it up, but didn't use it) and gratified that I'd had the bottle to go through with it. Whether we do it again will depend on being able to grab some practice time with the band and also sorting out the instrumentation.
The best part of the experience though was getting the band's feedback on our music. Friends, family, loved ones can all say how nice it is, but this is hardly independent feedback no matter how honest or well intentioned. To have other musicians tell you that you've written some really good songs is ... a vindication.
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