I will be appearing at Pangea on December 14 at 7pm. I haven’t performed a show, other than an Open Mic 20-30 minute segment, for some time. I have a wonderful producer, Alicia Crowe, who has helped me get the gig and taken much of the responsibility of producing away from me. What a blessing!
Getting a show together is no small feat. But a successful show has to appear to look easy and unlabored. Choosing songs, having charts, giving it a twist that is only yours, choosing instrumentation and at times other singers is time consuming and must be well thought out. I always demand “just the right” lyrics that move my story and I always have a story that connects what I want to convey in my choice of material. That material must flow so tempos and arrangements have to be considered. It is like birthing a baby. (I know because I have given birth twice and have three marvelous humans called Tod, and twins Tina and Traci to prove that I know what I’m talking about.) Selecting the material and relating the songs is no easy feat, but to me the only way I want to present what I have to say.
This probably goes back to my Theater training as a professional actress. (That’s what I thought I wanted to be before a series of life experiences called me to expressing myself through singing!) To me a song is a story that has to be told through the writer’s eyes, and then reinterpreted through the eyes of the teller of the story: the vocalist. Their stories don’t necessarily have to be the same, but the I, the vocalist, have to personalize to make the story live for the audience as well as myself. Getting this together for a program of 10-12 songs sometimes has me in inner turmoil about getting it “right”. I have learned many, many songs in the many years of going through the process. I also hate repeating myself with the same material the audience may have heard over and over. This is what I do to myself, and wish many others took the time to do when presenting themselves. Without saying anymore, let’s just say getting this show together and conducting my life has had me awake all night, running into walls, talking/singing/yelling aloud and annoying my neighbors during working a show and certainly being not quite present at times. Then I have to run it by the musical director and change or add more. But I love it every bit of the process when it is over. It’s all the creative process. More to come
