Experimentation

Life is a journey for learning. That's one of the reasons I love music so much. The journey will never be over. There's always something to learn, either within music itself or with the act of performing and/or seemingly unrelated things like fixing a flat tire on the way to a gig.
The last five weeks here at Arizona Ren Fest, I have had a safety set of songs ready to be performed especially for those times when I have a full audience. Even with my safe set of songs (songs that I know so well that even a screaming child covered in bells hanging from the rafters of my stage couldn't mess me up) I still experiment. Performance is more than just singing a song. It would be a pretty boring show if I stood on the stage, sang eight songs carefully and then went away. Many of my songs are not in English. I translate them with some liberty and lots of energy. It's actually the songs in English that I have a harder time finding something funny or at least interesting to say. Over these five weeks I have been slowly collecting the lines and jokes that work. I have also introduced a few new songs to my stage performing. This has been such a great time.
I realized this morning that I could summarize all if this as my goal for how I want to perform. I want to present real music with an entertaining sense of humor. I don't want to do the same ol' stuff. I don't want to talk down to peoples' intelligence. I just want to be able to be entertaining enough to give people something real and let them enjoy it.