Last week I posted about the audition that my band, Still Oz, had in Elbow Room last April 5. We passed the audition and were asked to return for a paid performance on both May 23.
We had to play 3 sets which meant about 25 songs or more. We hadn't played in a long time so we needed practice, which was difficult due to conflicting schedules, but we managed to re-learn enough songs.
Our first set went fairly well - we ended up throwing in a lot of songs we were very familiar with already. I managed to take a video of most of our songs and when I watched our performance of Third Eye Blind's "Jumper", I cringed as I was singing the verses way too quickly! We also performed Radiohead's "Creep" for the first time and it was a bit rusty with some wrong chords here and there but not bad overall - we got good applause from the crowd, in fact.
The second set was good too, but we played a lot of not-very-popular songs so the audience impact wasn't as high. We tossed in Bush's "Glycerine" (which we haven't played in ages!) and the Dave Matthews Band version of the Bob Dylan classic "All along the watchtower". "Stuck in a moment you can't get out of" by U2 was a partial disaster. While I was singing the first verse, Bunky told me twice to jump straight to the chorus so I omitted the second verse. But somehow the rest of my bandmates kept playing the second verse so it seemed like I actually forgot a portion of the song! Ugh. Anyways, we also got requests to play "No rain" by Blind Melon and "Crash into me" by Dave Matthews Band. Now most of the time, we get requests to play songs that we don't know how to play, so when we got this, we decided to go for it. We also tossed in "Black balloon" by Goo Goo dolls which is probably one of my favorite performances of ours that night.
Our third set was for the most part decent. The crowd was fairly sparse already so we didn't get a lot of cheers from the crowds anymore by this time. We performed Coldplay's "Yellow". Now clearly I am no Chris Martin, but what I loved about this performance is that I can now sing it much better than when we were starting out. I used to have difficulty singing in this range without belting. Also, my lower falsetto was too thin and I wasn't very good transitioning from a chest tone to a head tone and vice versa. Now I do a much better job of it (still room for improvement of course...)
Our last two songs for that night were "Far behind" by Candlebox and "Ants Marching" by Dave Matthews Band. What was interesting was that for most of the third set, which started at around 1230am, the crowd had thinned significantly so we no longer got a lot of strong crowd reaction. That changed when I belted out "Far behind" - the moment we finished, we got pretty loud cheers and applause from the crowd. Bunky actually gave me a high five and told me I nailed it. Which was great, except for the fact that when I checked my camera, I saw that it had run out of memory!!! I only managed to save the first 30 seconds of the song. I need to make sure that in our next gig, I start recording late enough in the show to make sure I get "Far behind" on video.
Anyways, a pretty good gig overall, and definitely not bad considering the amount of practice we got to put in. Click here for to see the rest of the videos of our gig (or well the rest of the vids I uploaded on youtube).
No comments:
Post a Comment