One of the worst things about doing the same open mics again and again in the same city is that you end up playing your same songs for the same people week after week. That’s also why I’m so excited that I will again be setting out on my worldwide open mic tour next week, so I will be singing for “virgin” audiences. But last night, going to one of my favorite open mics in Paris, at the Ptit Bonheur la Chance, I again found myself standing in front of this packed little basement room and KNOWING that half the people had heard my whole repertoire several times over in the past two or three years that I have played there!
Worse, there was this person there for whom I wanted to play, who had never heard me before. But I felt so restricted by the fact that half or more of the rest of the people had heard me a million times, that I dared not repeat what I felt were probably my best songs of the moment. So it was, with all these thoughts and constraints in my head, that I sang my song, “Since You Left Me,” and I repeated one verse twice and dropped the other verse by error, and I sang “You’re Going to Make Me Lonesome When You Go,” by Bob Dylan, and I sang a later verse too soon and segued right into the end of the song – missing two or three verses.
Well anyway…. it was nevertheless a cool night, and there were some other interesting musicians, new ones I did not know, like the banjo player who sang, and the Frenchman who sounded so polished with his Brit rock kind of songs that I was persuaded for a moment that he WAS Britrock. Great stuff.
Oh, and despite my second week in a row making a mess of it, for the second week in a row Juba the guitarist accompanied me, and I loved what he did on my song….
AHhhhhh, but I almost forgot the upside to playing at the same open mics all the time. It is the constant knowledge that you have to widen your repertoire with new songs of one’s own, and cover songs…. And that pushes you on. At least it does me….
A-Musing at Ptit Bonheur la Chance
March 6, 2013