5 Smart goals for performing songwriters Pt 4

5 Smart goals for performing songwriters Pt 4

Smart goal no 4: A warm response to your in-between-song banter (memorable entertainment other than your actual songs)

If we have stories to tell? Share them! Our audience want to take home something memorable and  that can come from a variety of events throughout one live show. In-between song stage banter can be as much of a memorable experience as the songs themselves and furthermore, when we share little slices of our personality, the audience are further endeared to us. For their sake as well as our own, let’s not bore them with a long and tiresome tale. There’s definitely an allowed time for talks between songs, but not every song.

PHOTO: TROY BLATCHFORD

Mix it up a little. Tell stories of how songs came about in the first place, and tell stories unrelated too. As long as we don’t set it up so that our audience is expecting a thread that leads into the song, we can by all means tell an unrelated, short story.

The downside of this is that we shouldn’t be expected to be entertainers as well as writers of memorable songs! However, the reason I view this as a smart goal is that there is a lot to be gained from sharing a little insight into our personalities off-stage. We become a little more human to our audience and a lot more amiable. There’s a reason why audiences have been complaining for decades about artists looking at their own shoes for the entire show and not interacting with the crowd. It’s rare thing when that is actually a natural performance trait of the artist and an audience can see right through the pretenders. It’s the pretenders in fact, that underestimate the intelligence of their audience.

Memorable entertainment in-between your songs, does not have to mean “comedy” nor does it mean you need to rehearse. One of these intelligent goals should have been to ‘Just be yourself’ and talk to your awesome crowd. Even if they haven’t yet shown you how awesome they are!

I’d love to hear your thoughts, comments, feedback on these smart goals for performing songwriters. Feel free to use the voicemail feature by clicking on the speak pipe tab on the right sidebar of this page. You can talk right into your computer’s microphone and leave me a message!

All the best, Karl.