Monday, May 23, 2011

Busking

So here's a little more about the busking I've been doing with Will from Scotland. We met nearly three weeks ago as he was playing guitar and singing in the subway station closest to my apartment. I don't normally ride the subway since I prefer to bike around usually, but on this day I was accompanying a friend to the station on her way home. I stopped to listen to Will and introduced myself when he finished his song, mentioning that I sing and play violin. He then started playing a tune that I also knew, "Last Chance with Mary Jane" by Tom Petty, and I spontaneously added some harmony vocals as he sang the chorus.We exchanged phone numbers. He called me two days later to ask if I wanted to meet up and jam in the park. After 1 hour of rehearsal, we had 4 songs that we could play all the way through together (including "Mary Jane") and they sounded quite good. He asked if I wanted to busk that evening and I agreed to it. We headed straight into Kreuzberg and started asking at bars if we could play for their patrons. I'm not sure how many bars we played that night, probably only three or maybe four, but I remember being amazed that this was me, I was doing this and it sounded good and people were giving me money (and beer) to do it.

Busking in bars is a very presumptuous business. You assume that people want to hear you play, or at least don't mind you playing in their vicinity, because they are trapped there with their drinks and once you start playing, they have no choice but to sit there and bear it. Sometimes you get to a place and you play your heart out, and no one is paying you the slightest shred of attention. Sometimes, it's way too loud for anyone to even hear you, even when you're playing your loudest, most raucous songs, usually the Irish drinking ones... And then there are bars, and these are my favorite, where you start playing and the whole place turns into the most rapt, adoring audience you've ever played for, and people are shushing each other so they can hear you better, and folks come up to you afterwards and thank you for coming and press Euro coins into your hands and ask for encores and email addresses and websites and make you feel like you're a famous person in a famous band and you just got done playing Wembley Stadium.

It's also a very emotional business, especially when it's more than one person. When you're working together, there's always the chance that one person won't have a good feeling about a place or a song and will refuse to play it, or you're trying to play pieces you think sound amazing and the audience doesn't react, or you get frustrated or angry with the other person. The emotional ante is upped when you start playing music you've written, because rejection from your partner or ambivalence from the audience hurts that much more.  I've enjoyed working with Will because he always says what he's thinking - there's no passive-aggressive behavior between us. If something needs to be said, it gets said right away rather than being left to fester.

Busking has been an enjoyable, challenging, eye-opening learning experience for me. I've carted my violin on my back around several neighborhoods in Berlin, playing on the street, in numerous bars, and a few times even on the subway, which provides the extra challenge of remaining upright and in tune while the train is motion. Through it I've met a ton of people and gotten much more familiar with the streets of this city. I've learned a lot in the last 2 weeks, and it's been great to use my musical talents to do something I love to do: perform for others. It's also been nice to earn a little money to live on. However, it does take up a lot of my time; out of the last 2 weeks' worth of evenings, Will and I busked approximately 90% of them. So I'm going to take a step back and not do as much of it in the coming weeks. I have some travel days on my train pass to use up before mid-June, so I need to focus on planning out those travels.

Here are some photos and videos from a gig we played last weekend at a wine/record shop. My friend Chi came to the show and took a few recordings. Will has done a lot of busking in Berlin during the past year and sometimes gets asked to play proper gigs - ones where the money is settled in advance, and you know people want to hear you play. He invited me along last weekend to accompany him on this gig, and we played a gig the night before in a little English pub in former West Berlin, where the proprietor immediately booked us for another show next month. At this point, I can play about a 1/3 of Will's entire repertoire, so I tend to join him on stage for a segment of each set and sit out the rest. In the videos, we perform 4 songs. The first one is one of Will's original pieces, called "The Clearances", which he wrote about the Scottish Highlands. The second is "Old Man Tucker", an American folk tune (I think it's actually Old Dan Tucker, but that's not how we sing it). The third video is us singing a song by the Kinks called "Waterloo Sunset", which we had rehearsed for literally the very first time that afternoon prior to the show. The last video is of me singing "Landslide" by Fleetwood Mac; we normally don't mess up the instrumental part in the middle, so just try to pretend like that didn't happen. :)




 


1 Comments:

At 08:53, Anonymous Paula said...

Wow, I just found your videos here and it really sounds great <3 Hope to hear more from you two soon :-)

I didn't know that you met Will on the subway, that's very cool :-)

Did you play on the subway alone?

I could never be that brave ;-)

 

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