On my way to the Galway Pub open mic, I made a brief visit to the Mecano last night to take in a song or two of a guy that Earle had been telling me about. In fact, I had spoken to the guy on the phone because he had ended up at the Mecano looking for my brunch, and of course I wasn’t there, since I’m no longer doing the brunch.
As I entered the Mecano I saw that the guy, whose name is Adam Farnsworth, sat on a stool in the spot where I used to sit, near the front door. But there was no mic, and his lousy acoustic classical guitar was not plugged into an amp. Adam, it turned out, does not need an amp or a mic or anything else, as he fills up a whole room with his powerful vocal prowess, which sounds like a cross between Axl Rose, Tom Waits, Robert Plant and – Adam.
Adam has been in Paris for a month working one of his regular gigs with the C.R. Avery & the Special Interest Group, which has played some top Paris venues. Too bad I didn’t get there earlier to get some of Adam on video.
But after speaking with Adam and Earle for a while, I moved on to the Galway. There I met up with Kim from Detroit, again, whom I had first seen at Ollie’s open mic a month or so ago. There were some other interesting performers as well, and I got to try out one of my new songs for the very first time.
As I said to Stephen Danger Prescott, the MC, it was the perfect environment for me to try out the song because no one seemed to be listening. There’s nothing like singing to yourself but with an audience present in order to shake off the fear of the first presentation of a new song. I got some compliments afterwards for some of my other songs – a couple of Dylan songs and What’s Up – so I know that some of the people were actually listening. But for a while it was nice to pretend to myself that no one was.