First of all, we owe an apology for the lateness of this update. We usually like to get a review up on Tuesdays, but we were on the road all day this past Tuesday before playing a show that evening, and that's part of what I want to talk about.
The show was great. We played at a fairly large neighborhood bar in a cozy residential zone not far from downtown Indianapolis. The place is called the Vollrath Tavern, and the venue rep's name is Elvis. We got there and Dave asked him where the bathroom was. He immediately fired back with "Men's or women's?" I knew right away that this dude and this night were gonna be awesome.
It turned out that the venue was an original-music-only venue, and after getting called and threatened by BMI or ASCAP or some other such fascist organization, they actually enforced it. When the first band played a cover song, they were immediately addressed by one of the workers and told they couldn't do that again. Then when we played our set, we played a relatively new song of our own, and we had our sound shut down in the middle! Someone in the audience swore that it was a cover of a Queen song. We were apologized to and given a free shot for our trouble; plus it was a good laugh when we started the song from the middle to finish it.
But it kind of got me thinking, as a songwriter, is it good to write something that reminds someone of something else? Obviously if it reminds him of something terrible, the answer is, "Go find a day job, clown." But if it reminds him of something he likes, shouldn't this be taken as a compliment? I think so. While it is important to have a voice and sound of your own, when a person listens to you for the first time, he doesn't know what you sound like, so he can't very well compliment your new song as sounding like you. It is notoriously difficult to describe music in and of itself without comparisons (try it sometime, and then you can come back and complain about my album reviews). So if a new fan is ready to believe that something we wrote was written by Fredury Mercury and company, I'm willing to take that as a compliment by comparison. It certainly means the crowd is listening, anyway!
The show was great. We played at a fairly large neighborhood bar in a cozy residential zone not far from downtown Indianapolis. The place is called the Vollrath Tavern, and the venue rep's name is Elvis. We got there and Dave asked him where the bathroom was. He immediately fired back with "Men's or women's?" I knew right away that this dude and this night were gonna be awesome.
It turned out that the venue was an original-music-only venue, and after getting called and threatened by BMI or ASCAP or some other such fascist organization, they actually enforced it. When the first band played a cover song, they were immediately addressed by one of the workers and told they couldn't do that again. Then when we played our set, we played a relatively new song of our own, and we had our sound shut down in the middle! Someone in the audience swore that it was a cover of a Queen song. We were apologized to and given a free shot for our trouble; plus it was a good laugh when we started the song from the middle to finish it.
But it kind of got me thinking, as a songwriter, is it good to write something that reminds someone of something else? Obviously if it reminds him of something terrible, the answer is, "Go find a day job, clown." But if it reminds him of something he likes, shouldn't this be taken as a compliment? I think so. While it is important to have a voice and sound of your own, when a person listens to you for the first time, he doesn't know what you sound like, so he can't very well compliment your new song as sounding like you. It is notoriously difficult to describe music in and of itself without comparisons (try it sometime, and then you can come back and complain about my album reviews). So if a new fan is ready to believe that something we wrote was written by Fredury Mercury and company, I'm willing to take that as a compliment by comparison. It certainly means the crowd is listening, anyway!
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