So you may be wondering, my faithful readers, what happened. (I mean, you all should have been there, but I’m willing to be gracious.)
Last time, I told you about a gig I was about to do at Storyspace in Cambridge, at the kind invitation of Mike Cohen, storyteller extraordinaire. And I was a bit nervous about this gig, because I was going to, well, have to tell stories. Not short stories, like the ones I tell as song introductions, but actual stories, with a beginning, and a middle, and an end (although they don’t necessarily need to be in that order, as Mike points out – that hurt my head a little bit until I thought about it for a while). And telling stories is a different thing than introducing songs.
So I did a lot of prep for this gig. And, in the end, it went – pretty well. I told three stories. The first was about my first band, Agent 13, and that story featured two of my songs: “Nantucket”, which is about an infamously disastrous weekend the band spent on Nantucket island as the substitute band for a band that the owner of the Chicken Box would have vastly preferred to have; and “Life is Like a River”, which I wrote about our bass player’s bachelor party. Then, I told a story about all the songs I’ve written on a dare, essentially, which culminated with “Shlomo the Dreidel Shark”, which I wrote in response to my friend Jon Waterman’s request for material for an album of holiday music (it did not make the album). And finally, I told a story about my parents, which led to “The Handyman’s Waltz”, which is about my dad’s idiosyncratic approach to home repair.
These were not introductions, although they incorporated the introductions I typically use with these songs – they were more, and some of them I told mostly without my guitar protecting me from the audience. Very different experience. I have a (shaky) video which I haven’t quite decided to share with you folks yet.
So I survived, and I even learned something about storytelling in the process (or so I like to think).
But the rollercoaster doesn’t end, does it? Because next up is another performance challenge: the songwriter in the round event. Dan and Faith Senie have invited me to help them out this coming week, and I hope you’ll stop by. Because, once again, I can’t do what I like to do, which is come up with a set list, and a carefully curated set of transitions and introductions; no, what I play will depend on whatever other people have played. So I have to brush up on just about everything, and I have to think on my feet (or, actually, my ass, because I’ll be sitting down while other people are playing), and I even had to – heaven help me – write a new song.
Just another day in the folk music trenches, people.