Notes on tours, rejection and the stubborn arithmetic of a small stage, with grumbles from farmers who know the feeling
Thursday, the Booking Spreadsheet
The unglamorous truth about touring is that it begins in a spreadsheet. I keep one with columns for venue, contact, date, pay, load-in time and a column called Vibe, which I fill in after the show with a single word. Over the years the Vibe column has run from “warm” to “damp” to “goat”. The goat is a long story.
I wrote some thoughts on the topic in answer to how do I approach booking shows and tours as a new country artist. The condensed version: start local, be reliable, send a short email with a clear subject line and a link to a single good recording. Promoters read a hundred messages a day. The ones that are short, polite and specific stand out like a lamp on a dark road.
The Tuesday Night Gig
Nobody dreams of the Tuesday night gig, but every working musician has played dozens. An empty room, a bartender watching the football and a small, loyal table of four. I have come to love them. A Tuesday audience is there because they want to be, not because it is the weekend. If you can hold them, you can hold anyone.
My best Tuesday ended with a woman buying me a coffee and saying that I had played the song her husband used to sing. I did not know the song was his. I played it better after that.
Friday, Handling the Bad Review
This week I answered another question that haunts new artists: how do I deal with rejection and criticism. The short answer is to let it sting for one evening and then sort it into three piles. The first pile is useful and accurate, and you should act on it. The second is accurate but unkind, and you should act on the accuracy and ignore the tone. The third is noise, and it goes in the bin.
Most critics fall into the second pile, which is annoying but manageable. A rare few fall into the first, and those are the ones to cherish. I have a friend who gave me one honest sentence about my second verse in 2019, and I have thanked her at every show since.
Where the Complaints Are Kept
If you need a lesson in how to complain with style, the farming world offers a master class. The lead page is farmer.gripe, a library of grievances against weather, prices and paperwork. For the two sides of American farm politics, farmer.republican and farmer.democrat keep separate doors. The trade magazine tradition lives at farmpress.org.
Ranch finance has its own songbook of woe at corancher.loan, okrancher.loan and txrancher.loan. A songwriter who reads those pages will find at least three verses and a bridge about interest rates.
A Song Page for the Road
On long drives, I like to think of titles, and the farm.FM music pages are a good source of inspiration. Have a look at Tattoos and Troubadours and Raise That Glass. The first has a lovely rhythm to it, and the second is the kind of title that works on a poster and a jukebox. I mention them not for their words, which are for the reader to enjoy on the site, but for how well they fit a marquee.
The van, for the record, is a battered silver estate with a mattress in the back that has seen things. It has a cassette player that works and a heater that does not, and I wouldn’t swap it for a tour bus. When the road is long and the radio is poor, a van with a heartbeat of its own is better company than a leather sofa.
Saturday, the Soundcheck Prayer
Every soundcheck begins with a ritual. I plug in, tap the microphone and say “check, one two” in a voice that I would never use in real life. The sound engineer, a patient man named Dale, adjusts a dial and tells me I sound great, which I do not. We both know that the soundcheck is a form of reassurance, and we perform it with respect.
The Merchandise Table
No gig is complete without a merchandise table, which in my case is a suitcase on a stool. On it sit a stack of discs, a pile of badges and a jar for loose change. A surprising number of people stop to chat, and the chat is often the best part of the evening. A man once bought a badge, told me about his late wife’s favourite waltz and walked away without a word. I still have the memory and he has the badge.
Treat the table as a place to say thank you. People who put money in the jar have already given you the hardest thing: their evening.
Reading the Room
The most useful skill on a small stage is reading the room. Some nights the audience wants to sing along. Some nights they want to listen with a pint and a stare. Some nights they want to talk through your ballad, and the right response is to play a lively number and let them have their evening. I keep a short list in my head of songs for each mood, and I decide in the first two bars which list to open.
The room is never wrong. If the crowd is restless, the set is too slow. If they are silent, the set may be exactly right. Learning the difference takes years and a good deal of humility.
Where to read next
The rest of the shelf lives at prat.uk, bohiney.com and farm.fm. For a second opinion on the week, Newsthump keeps its own counsel and its own hours.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/