Originals or covers?

[majorminor]

I’d like to get a little discussion going about whether your playing emphasizes originals or arrangements of other peoples songs or maybe a blend of both and what that means to you. There are some folks here that I identify strongly with only wanting to do their own original material: Flake, Loopy, Marshall, VI, Hanners. I’m sure there are others as well.

For me – I still get a pretty big kick out of unlocking a great song I’ve heard. I listen to music a lot and hear something I like, and putting it on the player and breaking it down accurately, or figuring out how I can play the tune with the skills that I have brings me pleasure. I try to write from time to time and I just don’t seem to have IT - that creative whatever inside of me looking for a way out. This isn’t something that bothers me much as my current goals are just to get better at playing the guitar and trying to learn other people’s stuff from players better than I seems to be the best thing to keep my skills developing. Another benefit is that on those rare occasions I play for someone else I can usually make an immediate connection with a known song etc.

Just curious as to what your particular emphasis or perspective is and why.

[billhammond]

Good question, Steve.

When I play solo gigs at places where I am not just background music, I make a point out of scattering my "known" songs periodically through my play list, as I know how valuable they are. They are currency.

You can bemoan that all you want, on any number of grounds, but if you are playing for a GENERAL audience, playing familiar material at some point is necessary if you are really gonna connect with them.

That doesn't mean that they have to OVERLY familiar, mind you.

I think of covers in two categories:

-- Those that became wildly popular because they are really great songs in all regards and have stood the test of time. These are songs like "Ain't Misbehavin' " and "Here Comes the Sun" and "Summertime" and on and on.

-- Those that are really great songs in all regards but were not so wildly popular, for whatever reason: I think of John Gorka and Peter Mayer and Richard Thompson songs, of "Louise," or "Deep River Blues" -- songs that people more attuned to acoustic-style music will almost consider "standards," but the general public might know them only as somewhat familiar.

But no matter what, there are so freaking many tunes out there that when it comes to choosing which ones you will cover in your live act, there really is no reason to sell out and play stuff you don't like, or even feel lukewarm about. I am sure I could make a lot of people oooh and ahhh at some venues by playing "Rocky Mountain High," for instance, but I don't like that song, so I don't do it. So I do "Abilene" instead, almost as familiar and a song I really DO like and can put some emotion and creativity into.


That is a whole separate consideration, BTW -- ideally, your covers should be ones that you can make your own without sacrificing any of their inherent goodness. Some of the ones I do I leave pretty much alone, others I have modified significantly. You just gotta feel your way along, I reckon.

p.s. I think you do a fine job of selecting covers that match up well with your voice and your guitar playing.

[davidhanners]

As someone who considers himself primarily a songwriter, about 99 percent of my set is original material. That said, if I find a cover that I can bring a bit of myself to, I'll do it. At present, the only cover I routinely do is "Oh Susannah," but I slow it down, do all four verses (with the racially problematical stuff re-written) and I throw a minor chord in the chorus to add some "tension" to the song.

Then again, it doesn't hurt to know some fun covers. Last night at an open stage at a bar, I pulled out CCR's "Have You Ever Seen the Rain?" and folks really reacted to it. At this particular deal, I try to throw a cover or two among my songs because it's a bar and they're not really going to be listening to your well-crafted lyrics anyway. They're wanting a "vibe" and they're wanting something vaguely familiar.

If you're just doing a cover and trying to emulate the original, you might as well try out for "American Idol." But if you can do a cover and bring something of your own style to it, then I say go ahead and do it.

[Doug]

Bill said it better than I could have. I do mostly covers, (I don't write well). But I mostly do covers that are lower down the order than top 40 stuff.

I have a personal thing against Denver and even though I can do "Country Roads" I don't, if I do a Denver it's something like "Some days are diamonds". When I'm putting together an arrangement I often listen to multiple versions of the song and work from there.

I like to play out and will do what I call "Holiday Inn music" if forced to get or keep the gig.

And sometimes you misjudge the crowd. A little while back I did a couple of biker bars. For the first one I started with my general bar sets and morphed into stuff like "Itty Bitty Titty" and they loved it. A couple of weeks later I did the other biker bar, coming in with heavily flavored with that kid of stuff and what they wanted was "Holiday Inn music". Oh well can't win them all.

[knobtwister]

Back when I was playing in and promoting a band my one line answer to the "what kind of music do you play?" question was
"We play the greatest hits of people you never heard of". 99% of what we played was covers and 99% of the audience thought they were originals because they'd never heard of the song or the writer.
Our defacto music director would teach us new tunes and purposely not let us hear the original versions. We'd work up our own arrangements that were often very different from the original.

Don

[Cornflake]

Good topic, Steve. I used to do only originals but these days up to a quarter of our set consists of covers. They're usually not very familiar numbers to most of our audience. Recently we've done Iowa Waltz, To Live Is To Fly, Scarlet Tide, and instrumentals by Turlough O'Carolan and Vaughan Williams. Even I get tired of my own mind and sensibility and I like to hear other people's material.

When I started out, I wouldn't do covers because I didn't think I was any good as a performer. Original material was safe because the audience had never heard a better version of my songs. Eventually I got more secure. But I'm basically a songwriter, not a singer or guitar player, and getting my songs out there is what it's mostly about for me.

Bill is right that you have to be careful with original material--an audience can only absorb so much that is new before they get tired of working that hard and want something that's easy on the brain. Years ago I learned that you can deflect that problem in part by giving them familiar music structures (e.g., twelve-bar blues) with new words, and by making the original material as accessible as possible rather than cryptic. That's why most of my lyrics are very straight-ahead.

[Deleted]

What everyone else said. I think it's a good idea to have a mix of covers and originals. What percentage of each is up to you and what you feel works best based on your connection with your audience.

Geeeeeee look...... I manage to put two sentences together without a sengull misspeelling!

[Marshall]

I still get a pretty big kick out of unlocking a great song I’ve heard

Good way to put it. It can be very satisfying to be inspired by a song, and to, (at the same time), recreate it, and reinterpret it. That's a high form of the art; especially when the audience will probably not be familiar with the tune. Even if they do know it well, it's still highly artistic to mix the familiar with the new to give it life.

I guess I get to do that regulary in the church band I play in. I only do a solo myself every 6 to 8 weeks. But when i am called upon, I throw myself totally into the interpretation and "communication" of the tune. It's a great joy to be that wrapped up in the craft of communication.

But, I don't ever seem to save those tunes/interpretations. I guess I hold the act of song creation as the "highest level" of the musical art. And I'm always trying to work on achieving that level.

Maybe it's like having diaharia. I'm just so preoccupied with getting it all out, that I don't have time to focus on much else. . . . , More likely, there's no better "high" for me than to have completed a tune that I think effectively communicates a thought on all levels.

Sometimes I just play one, and think, " Wow. How did that happen ? Did that just pass through me ? "

It's like they have a life of their own.

[Marshall]

I think it's a good idea to have a mix of covers and originals

Oh definitely. Especially if you want to win over an audience. Baraging them with all new material is asking for their eyes to glaze over. But that's still what I do, I guess. I'm trying (in a minor slow moving fashion) to build an audience for my tunes. So, the few individual gigs I do (usually open mics) I really try to be animated between songs and tell the story behind each song. I really want to give the audience every opportunity to become engaged with the song. New material is tough for an audience to absorb. (We don't normally decide we really like a song we hear on the radio, let's say, until we've heard it a few times. That puts a heavy burdon on an audience to hear nothing but new material).

And, "Yes." I will shut up and let the thread get back to it's original line of reasoning.

(sorry)

[billhammond]

Let the record show that when I was championing a mix of originals and covers, I was talking about playing gigs -- gigs of a couple sets or more.

For open-mike mini-sets and even for a full set on a night where others are playing other sets, I see no reason not to play your own material only, or as much as you possibly can, being careful only to mix up the tempos and keys and keep the between-song chatter to a minimum (as I believe that the best songs need no explanation, or at least very little).

[loopysanchez]

Originals or Covers? In a word, "yes".

Lately my duo has been playing around 3 gigs a month in the bar of one of the nicer restaurants in H'ville, and there's no way I could fill up 4 sets with all original songs, unless I pulled out some B-list material. So my game plan has been to play my best 14 or 15 original songs, play about another 10 or 12 covers, and play 3 or 4 original instrumentals over the course of the evening. Then, for the sake of vocal variety, and because she can really sing great (way, way better than me), my percussionist sings about 10 cover songs, too. It seems to be the right mix of music to keep us booked there, so I don't plan on messing with success.

Now, when I play the occasional solo gig somewhere where I'm more of a "featured performer" than background noise, I play about an 80/20 mix of originals/covers, since presumably I've already got people's attention based on the fact they walked in the door to hear me play. But when I'm shoved in the corner of a noisy bar and have 4 hours to fill in front of a crowd that's there to eat/drink, and for whom the music is an afterthought, I don't mind playing enough familiar covers to draw a little attention my way (and hopefully some tip money), rather than just playing a string of my own songs that I know they won't give a fighting chance on their own.

[Cornflake]

"For open-mike mini-sets and even for a full set on a night where others are playing other sets, I see no reason not to play your own material only, or as much as you possibly can, being careful only to mix up the tempos and keys and keep the between-song chatter to a minimum (as I believe that the best songs need no explanation, or at least very little)."

Agreed, Bill, but I think between-song chatter can be a plus. I do a fair amount of it. My chatter is seldom about the songs, since I concur that songs shouldn't need an explanation. I think the chatter gives the audience a breather and lets you cleanse the mental palate. That can be important if, for example, you're moving from a slow-death song to Zippity Doo-Dah.

[billhammond]

cornflake said:

"For open-mike mini-sets and even for a full set on a night where others are playing other sets, I see no reason not to play your own material only, or as much as you possibly can, being careful only to mix up the tempos and keys and keep the between-song chatter to a minimum (as I believe that the best songs need no explanation, or at least very little)."

Agreed, Bill, but I think between-song chatter can be a plus. I do a fair amount of it. My chatter is seldom about the songs, since I concur that songs shouldn't need an explanation. I think the chatter gives the audience a breather and lets you cleanse the mental palate. That can be important if, for example, you're moving from a slow-death song to Zippity Doo-Dah.

I meant chatter about the songs. Banter is dandy.

[kenlarsson]

I've been working on incorporating more chatter into my performances, in large part to help facilitate connecting with the audience and to (hopefully) entertain them. There's a balance that needs to be struck there between good stories and too much information.

I mostly do covers but mix in some of my own material. I also do a mix of "known to general audiences" covers and "obscure stuff I like" covers. I always try to do some well known stuff even though some may look down on me for doing it. Nothing like getting the audience at the coffee house into singing along to something like "Happy Together". I think a large part of being a performer as opposed to being an artist is helping folks have a good time. I ain't no artist.

That said, there is an art to being a successful performer and interpreter of other peoples material. I think if done well it is just as artistically challenging as doing original material.

[Russell Letson]

Lessee--Frank did covers. Ella did covers. Diana Krall (until one recent album) does covers. Ditto Bucky Pizzarelli and his son. Doc Watson. For godsake, even Louis did mostly covers. Before Bob Freakin Dylan, it was called "standard repertory" and it was what 98% of musicians did. (The other 2% was Duke Ellington, Hoagy Carmichael, Johnny Mercer, Peggy Lee, and a tiny handful of other performing composers.) With genuine respect and sympathy for the songwriters among us, if you do whole sets of original material, you'd better be damn good unless you want to be addressing (as is the case with contemporary poets) an audience consisting mostly of fellow craftsbeings. The rest of us might just leave after the first set. (As I did a decade ago at a David Wilcox concert.)

The universe of great songs is immense and incredibly fine, and arranging and presenting that material is an art and craft that doesn't get nearly enough respect in the post-Bob world.

[red-faced and panting] OK, that's my semi-annual rant. Anybody want to talk about religion now?

[Marshall]

A couple of concepts being batted around here.

Art and Entertainment

and

Art and Craft.

Truth be told. There's a fair component of all of these in every good performance. The balance can be different depeding on the artist's desires and the audience's expectations.

[Marshall]

Oooh. I like David Wilcox !

And last night I went to a bar to see a women I had met at an open mic do a couple sets. There was another performer, so she did sets 2 and 4. She told me to stick around for her last set cause she had a couple friends joining her for harmonies and stuff. It was getting late

Her first set was very good. She has a beautiful voice and writes some nice inventive heart felt tunes.

Her second set started with some sappy nondescript cover tune with 3 part acoustic guitar/3 part harmony without any personality whatsoever.

I went home early.

(PS - the other performer had a stunning high voice. He mixed some nice original material with interpretive covers. Quite nice overall. Then he ended his second set with a vocal gymnastic version of Purple Rain that was meant to highlight his falsetto vocal range. . . . , Yuck. Made me wanna puke.)

[Shannon]

Covers for me, for the simple reason that my previous attempts to write have been miserable failures.

[Russell Letson]

I like David Wilcox in principle--he's a fine guitarist and singer and a polished performer. But the night I saw him, almost every song and bit of chat was about how wonderful it was to be in a relationship, how good he felt about it, how great it was not to be lonely any more, et tedious cetera. At the time I was about 25 years into my first and only marriage (37 years next week), and I found this over-tight focus a bit trying after around the third iteration. He shoulda varied the subject matter, or composed some much better melodies.

[dradtke]

That would be, of course, Frank Jepsen and Ella Murtz.