A Gig Of One’s Own 

We are currently in a power outage that has been going on since yesterday evening. It’s the longest power outage I’ve ever experienced. It’s the first of April and we’ve had six inches of fresh snow. It’s kind of peaceful… The streets are very quiet. There are no mechanical sounds in the house; no fridge buzz, no furnace fan, no water heater.
I played my first ever live performance in Minnesota this week. Last Monday night. It was at the open mic night at Sociable Cider Werks. I played two songs—Pine Needles From A Christmas Tree, and Talkin’. I’m hoping to release them soon as my next single. I was so, so incredibly nervous. I was nervous two days before the thing, and then it just grew from there. Good lord I’ve never been so nervous. I don’t even know why. I practiced incessantly for multiple days leading up to it. The pressure was incredibly low; it was 10:30pm at a cidery full of people in various states of inebriation. They cheered no matter what you played. But none of that seemed to matter to my nerves.
Luckily it went really well; I played as well as I could hope. People seemed to like it, and I even got offered to play a longer set at their “songwriter showcase” on a Tuesday night! So now I have a real gig on the books. The thing that felt so good about it was feeling the connection with a live audience. I didn’t know how much I had missed that. When I was younger I would have said I didn’t like playing live, and I don’t think I had the words to describe what it was like to play and connect with people. I knew I had felt it before, but I don’t think I understood that it was so powerful until I went a while without it.

I’m happy to be playing live again, to be connecting with an audience again.