THIRSTY LION POST-MORTEM (&C.)...

Thirsty Lion show was good. Only three of us “guests”—one performer didn’t show up. Fairly big audience—and very appreciative, even though most of them had come to hear the other two guys. (One of those guys was very, very good, too. Like me, he played all originals, and all love songs; he also had a decent voice, and had definitely mastered his guitar. His train song, the most country-sounding song he did—written, he said, for a girl who was leaving for Nashville—was one of the best-written songs, lyrically and musically, that I’ve heard in a long time, and I complimented him on it.)

The songs of mine the audience seemed to like best were “Spend the End of the World with Me” and “Pole Dancing for Jesus” (I saw hands clapping to “I May Write You from Jupiter,” too). Closed the set with “Bluebird on My Windshield” rather than “The Cat with the Strat,” since “Bluebird” is a love song, and that went over well, too.

Hosts Skip Farmer and wife Nancy are the ones behind that “Influence Music Hall” in Hillsboro I’ve seen promoted on Portland Craigslist, and they encouraged me to come to their Friday night open mike thingie. The attendees would really like my stuff, I was told. I hadn’t gone previously, because it is on a Friday night, and on Friday nights I’ve usually gone down the street to City Hall to play music instead. Hillsboro is a 90-minute drive away instead of a 2-1/2 block one. However, they may have given me a good reason to go to “the Influence” one of these Friday nights.

Skip is a sound guy (and near as I can tell, a pretty good one—I understand he used to do it professionally). One of the things he does at “the Influence” is record the performers; for $15 ($10 if you’re a member of their Musicians’ Guild) he’ll e-mail you *.mp3 files of the songs you performed, recorded off the soundboard (so levels are set right, and there’s minimal ambient noise). A possible solution, here, to the “how do I get songs recorded cheaply?” issue I flagged with respect to the Song-a-Month Experiment. I could get three songs recorded—professionally, I think, though I’d have to listen to the product to be sure—for the cost of five bucks apiece and a trip to Hillsboro. Yes, I’d do that.

It’d be me and solo guitar, at least the first time—but there are some songs of mine that work well with just solo guitar. “Leavin’ It to Beaver” is one: it’s over six minutes long without a lead break, and every one of those long verses is chock-full of lyrics. “One Gas Station” might be another—it seems to drag if you add a lead break (and a lead break makes it go over five minutes). I would want to concentrate on performing songs there that have not been recorded professionally—but that’s some 75% of the “catalog.” I have a lot to choose from.

And if the recordings are good? I would want to see if fiddler Jane would want to go there with me on a Friday night, and perform (and record) three songs that present well with just guitar and fiddle. “The Abomination Two-Step” comes immediately to mind; so does “Spend the End of the World with Me.”

The other possibility—Skip and Nancy mentioned it, too—is there are a bunch of musicians that come to the Influence shows, and some of them could be prevailed upon to be an impromptu backup band for songs if I wanted. I know some musicians who could jump in and do a more-than-acceptable job first time through on a song they’d never heard before (I was told by one fellow in southern Oregon that my stuff was easy to follow because the music was so predictable). What I don’t know—and would have to find out—is whether these people in Hillsboro could do that. I’d have to watch them at work—and talk to them some—before I could know better. One song that could easily be done with an impromptu band is Diane Ewing’s “Alabama Blues”: I tried to get that “just a bunch of guys in a bar” feel when I recorded it in Nashville in 2007, but the session guys Mike Dunbar had assembled were just too professional-sounding.

I’ve talked up the Song-a-Month Experiment to a bunch of people now, and everyone I’ve talked to seems to agree with the “why do albums?” argument. I think I’d better do it. Might be a couple other writer-performers I know who might follow suit.

Rehearsal Thursday night for the “Oops, I Forgot Your Valentine” show at the Beaver Mercantile Saturday night. Friday? Might still go to City Hall. I’ve been doing an awful lot of traveling lately.

Joe