How polished are we getting here?

I've spent the last week or so really struggling with the commitment to develop 5 polished minutes of my music that I made in a previous blog post. 

Part of it is just trying to decide which 5 minutes and what counts as polished. I could dig in to some of my older songs like "F-ing Fridge," or "Beef Dylan". But those are near polished already. Do I go with some of my middle-ground songs that need some work? Or do I grab a couple of the new songs I wrote last month and get those up to standard? 

I started last weekend by putting together a list of all the songs I've written to date including some info like how many times I've played it live, if it's a kazoo song and wether I'd consider the song active, defunct, needing work etc. The first thing I learned immediately was that I've written a lot of songs since July 2024. 54 songs to be exact. I'm pretty proud of that. 

But of those 54 songs, a good half of them can be eliminated pretty early. Songs that are maybe inappropriate, don't fit the project or I just don't really like. Another quarter of them need a lot of work and I don't quite need them. And that brought me to my new realization this week - what do I need? 

While I'm grateful for the advice from people that some of my songs would benefit from some polish, I can't lose sight of what my overall goals are right now. I still have playing my first real gig as one of my top goals. I'm behind in terms of timeline on that, but it doesn't mean I can't still work on it and keep putting together something excellent to have ready when I get the call. 

So, in the spirit of pursuing that goal, I really need 20 polished minutes, not 5. I can MAKE 5 minutes out of the 20, but I can't go the other way. 

With that in mind, it was very easy to put together a little set of songs that are about 20 minutes long. I've been practicing them on electric and acostic guitar, making choices about kazoo use, practicing inter-song banter and maybe most importantly, recording my practices for later review. I'll be listening to those recordings to dial in the parts I need to fix, change and polish so that I get those 20 minutes solid as can be. 

 Another aspect of the polish that I need to work on is my stage work. I'm not nervous on stage per se, but I am jacked up. And that high energy isn't doing me many favours. It's something I'd really like to fix but I wasn't seeing a lot of progress with. 

Luckily, I got some good advice this weekend from an old source, The Samurai Guitarist, Sammy G. In a video about legendary guitar fails he talks about how to deal with the scenario where you sound great at home in practice but then completely bomb on stage. He gives two pieces of advice that really stick with me:

1. Practice until you can't screw it up - always the most boring solution but the best solution. And this really ties back to my focus and polish ideals. I need to make those 10 or so songs be complete second nature. 
2. Play live as often as possible so that it isn't unusual anymore - this is  where I need to get out to Open Mics as much as possible, jam with others and just generally practice not at home as much as possible. 

Basically the idea here is make your performance better so it's less affected by nerves/addrenaline. And get yourself jaded to live performance so that you don't get as much nerves/adrenaline when you play. I'm taking this a bit further in that I've made a point to just practice in weird places or change things up on myself. This past weekend I went and jammed with a friend and played some songs for him. I went outside and played on the deck. 

I'm also trying to make my practice regime look a bit more like what a live performance is going to look like for me. That means plugging my guitars in to an amp so I'm more familiar with  hearing myself repeated back from afar. I sing into a mic, even if it's not plugged in so that I'm not trying to figure out mic placement while I'm on stage. I go through the motions I expect to go through live, but at home so that at least those elements are second nature. 

And I'm just getting out there. I'm focusing on playing live, playing with others, playing anywhere but my home studio. 

And how about those demos?

I've mentioned in some earlier blogs that I was getting the feeling like I might need to do some recordings to help get my name out there a bit more. I'm still not feeling super enthusiastic about doing any sort of studio recordings. I'm sure I'll need to get there eventually, but it just seems like one of those things designed to take my money. And I think there's a cheaper way. 

I've been very influenced by Jesse Welles in tackling this project. I really like the way he writes songs and his lyrics are funny, compassionate and wonderful protest. But I'm also aware of his stuff because of his regular Instagram Reel posts where he shares a one-take performance of one of his songs in a cornfield or dive-bar bathroom. And I think that's a direction I need to explore too. 

I've had it on my list to start a YouTube page for this project for some time. I've been posting what videos I have on my personal YouTube channel - and while that works fine, it's the only account I have for this project that isn't bespoke. So this morning I started the channel up (or more accurately, rebranded an old defunct channel I had). There is absolutely nothing there now, but feel free to head over and be my first subscriber. I'll move the videos I've already done over there over the next week or two and I think I'll make a goal to post a new song every 10-14 days. I've also got some fun content ideas that would work well on YouTube that I can start doing over there. 

So all of that to say, I think that I've started to coagulate what I want the next phase of this project to look like. I've got a nice 20 minute set together, I've got some backup songs I could pull in at a moment's notice and I've got a good 10 or so songs in the wings ready to be added to my set as my career here starts to grow. I've got an idea of how I'll start sharing my recorded materials with others and a new set of goals for improving my live performance. 

I'm feeling confident, emboldened and just a little bit sexy.