The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #121329 Message #2651426
Posted By: GUEST,Tom Bliss
08-Jun-09 - 01:05 PM
Thread Name: To introduce songs, or not, and how?
Subject: RE: To introduce songs, or not, and how?
Well, if I was going round and round the same local singarounds on a regular basis, seeing largely the same faces most of the time, and only doing two or three songs, not only would I myself want to ring the changes, both in terms of songs and intros, but I wouldn't need to tee-up my songs, because everyone would soon know them (and probably be bored of them too)!
But at most of my gigs, a majority of the people there have not seen me before. I'm not going to leave out an important story or a good gag (finding gags that fit the stories is not as easy as you'd think) just because a few people may have heard it before. If that's going to stop people coming, then I'm not going to loose any sleep over it, and if me doing proper intros is going to annoy people, then I'm very happy for those people to stay away (their grumpy faces might spoil the atmosphere)!
Not many get to see me more than twice a year or so, and there are certain songs that I usually want to play (because the shift CDs) and that people want to hear, because they're the favourites, and are usually requested anyway. Plus there's no point in doing a lot of songs that you've not got on CD, because every one you do is a potential sale lost, (no sales = no food nor petrol), so that keeps the repertoire reasonably tight.
Of course you alter the stories to fit the slot. The more people on stage, usually, the more brief you need to be. With Piper Sons we hardly did any intros at all - and we keep then tighter in the duo than I do when I'm on my own.
Would the aversion to intros apply to 'proper' storytelling, I wonder? Should a story teller tell the tale in a different order, and maybe change the charactors names, and even the key events, every time?
I'd find that hard to do, because all my stories are about real events - and the more atmosphere and background I give the more interested people usually become (as long as I've prepared the spiel properly and don't loose my thread.
Certainly it's much better to do a good scripted intro than a weak ad lib.