Three hours of background music for a room that never once looked up from its own conversations. A genuinely useful lesson in a specific kind of humility this town keeps teaching me.
Played a three-hour bar gig tonight at one of the mid-tier downtown venues that books live music primarily as ambient background for a crowd there mostly for drinks and conversation rather than for the actual performance, and spent the entire three hours playing to a room that, as best I could tell scanning the crowd between songs, never once actually stopped its own conversations to properly listen, a genuinely humbling experience I have had many times before across my years doing this but that landed with particular weight tonight for reasons I have been trying to properly work out since packing up my gear.
This is, I think, one of the genuinely underdiscussed realities of trying to make a living as a working musician in this town, that a meaningful share of the actual paid gigs available, especially for someone still building a career rather than already headlining rooms people specifically come to see, function essentially as skilled background music, technically demanding, genuinely well-compensated relative to many other entry points into this industry, and almost entirely disconnected from the kind of direct, attentive audience connection that drew most of us to this career in the first place.
I found myself, somewhere around the second hour tonight, genuinely wrestling with whether that specific disconnect actually mattered, whether playing skilled, well-rehearsed music to a room not actually listening represents some kind of meaningful compromise of the reasons I moved to this town, or whether it is simply, honestly, a legitimate and entirely respectable way to make a living doing something I am genuinely good at, regardless of whether tonight’s specific audience happened to be paying close attention.
I landed, by the end of the third hour, somewhere closer to the second interpretation, though I want to be honest that arriving there took some genuine, deliberate reasoning rather than simply feeling naturally settled about it from the start. The bar owner pays me fairly and consistently for a specific, valued skill, providing exactly the kind of pleasant, well-executed atmosphere his venue is actually paying for, and there is nothing genuinely dishonorable about delivering precisely that service well, even if it looks considerably less glamorous than the more attentive, connective performance experience I get during my occasional proper listening-room shows.
What I think actually matters, reflecting on tonight properly, is maintaining real clarity about which kind of gig I am actually playing on any given night, and calibrating my own expectations and emotional investment accordingly, rather than showing up to a background bar gig expecting the same kind of connective, attentive experience a dedicated songwriter round or listening room show is specifically designed to provide. Tonight was never going to be that kind of night, and I think some of my own discomfort came from momentarily forgetting that distinction rather than from anything genuinely wrong with the gig itself.
A single woman near the end of the bar did come up during my last break, mentioning she had actually been listening more closely than I realized, and asking about one specific original song I had worked into the set between the requested covers, a small, genuine moment of real connection that, in hindsight, I think mattered considerably more to me than it probably should have, given how starved I apparently was, by that point in the night, for any sign at all that someone in the room had actually been paying attention.
I am playing a proper listening-room show later this week, a considerably different kind of gig where the whole room will actually be there specifically to hear the music, and I suspect I will appreciate that particular audience’s attention with real, renewed gratitude precisely because of how thoroughly tonight reminded me not to take it for granted. Both kinds of gigs, I am trying to genuinely believe writing this tonight, have their own legitimate place in an actual working music career, even if only one of them feeds the specific, deeper reason most of us actually moved to this town in the first place.
I think what I actually want to hold onto from tonight, more than the specific discomfort of playing to an inattentive room, is the reminder it gave me about calibrating gratitude correctly across the genuinely wide range of gigs a working musician actually has to string together to make a real, sustainable living in this business. The listening-room shows feed something the bar gigs simply cannot, and the bar gigs pay bills the listening-room shows, however creatively fulfilling, frequently cannot manage on their own given how much smaller and less commercially oriented those rooms tend to be.
Both kinds of nights, I am increasingly convinced, deserve their own honest place in how I think about this career, rather than treating one as the real, meaningful work and the other as some lesser, merely transactional compromise. Tonight was real work too, skilled, professional, fairly compensated work, even if the specific reward looked considerably different from what a proper listening room offers, and I think arriving at that reframing, uncomfortable as tonight initially felt, is genuinely worth the three hours it took me to get there.
More from this author at Camden Rose, prat.uk.