JW - 1/19/2013

Everybody on board after skipping a week due to Keith's illness.  Similar to the last session in that we sounded very rough to start, then got a lot better.  I'd say we sounded pretty good by the end.  Personally, I felt run down (from work) and wasn't at my best, but I missed playing last week and couldn't wait to get at it in spite of how I felt.

We started work on some of the new songs.  "Let It Be" works well enough.  Doesn't seem like a good song for a bar band to me, but I'm willing to give it a shot and see how an audience likes it.  Could be a great change of pace, and certainly a song most bar bands won't touch in spite of popularity.

"Movin' On" by Bad Company has a few timing issues, but is a natural fit and won't be much trouble to work out.  "Surrender" also came together quickly, though I'd like to work the vocals out more precisely than we have.

Those three will be added to the list for our 2/23 show, along with bringing some songs back from the sidelined list.  I'd like to have more change from the last time, but it seems that everybody has their hands mighty busy these days in their personal lives, myself included.  I'd also like to see more of a steady rotation of songs coming in and out of the list, rather than the relatively few substitutions we've seen to date, but I'm alone on that front.  Most of the group tends to resist any attempts to organize some things (one of them being the set list) too rigidly.

We had some fun today with bringing back some of the sidelined songs and getting a little creative with them.  "Mississippi Queen" and "Born on the Bayou" were back, with brief spontaneous digressions into other songs during "Born on the Bayou".  We also played the Stones' "Brown Sugar", which I'd played years ago with other bands and apparently used to be part of the JW song list.  It sounded really good almost right away and might be added to the list.

We had some discussion re: our PA set-up, and agreed to experiment with running everything through the mixing board.  Keith thinks we'll lose too much of our sound that way, but seemed to be the only dissent.  Everybody else is at least willing to try it.  Looking forward to that, since it should result in a much better mix.  I believe that will help our playing, since we'll be able to hear each other much better, which should help to reduce the goofy little mistakes that we've had too often on stage in the past.  I know we're better than we've sounded in public so far.

We also had some discussion of possible upcoming shows.  Still nothing terribly new, but that's okay.  I'd rather get the bugs worked out of our performances before going too much further.