When bands compete, you win!

Olympic figure skating is weird.

Not the figure skating part. The Olympic part. Think about it. Here you have performers displaying breathtaking, beautiful movement, and piercing through the musical accompaniment is the voice of some commentator, informing us exactly how impressive or unimpressive we should find the last half lutz. At the end, judges hold up numbers: their quantitative assessment of the routine.

I'm not saying you can't regard skaters as athletes. It requires brutal training and inhuman stamina to do what they do. But so does ballet. Can you imagine announcers interrupting Prokofiev's score as the dancers leap and twirl their way through Romeo and Juliet? Can you imagine the Arts & Entertainment critics for your local newspapers holding up starred reviews as the performers take their final bow?

Also, as much as the judges might try to base their decisions on objective standards, figure skating doesn't lend itself to the emergence of clear winners. In baseball, the winning team is the one with the most runs at the end of the ninth inning. In track, the winner is whoever reaches the finish line first. You'll never hear a referee say, "The Giants, y'know, they scored the most downs this game, but it felt like they were just going through the motions. The passion, the gestalt wasn't there. We're gonna have to give this to the Ravens."

I think about things like this at times like this, when gearing up for tonight's Acoustic Battle of the Bands.

Musical competitions are kind of silly, for all of the reasons above. Musicians don't win because their songs or performances are better than everyone else's by some objective standard. They win because they get more friends to vote for them, or because the judges happen to like the kind of music they play.

So why do it, then? Why do Ron the Drummer and I enter Cinder Bridge into the Acoustic Battle every time?

Because it's fun. It's a helluva lot of fun. We get to do our thing for people who come for other bands and might not otherwise learn about us. We get to talk to the other performers. We get to hang out with people who love listening to music.

I've pondered ways one could make the judging of Battle of the Bands more fair. Some list of objective criteria that would force judges and voters to look beyond their personal preferences. I get about two seconds into this when I realize what a stupid idea that is. It's impossible to be completely objective when judging art (again, see above), and if you tried, you'd suck all the fun out of the event.

The point isn't winning (though winning makes it even more fun). The point is giving bands an excuse to get their music out there. The point is giving fans a chance to support the bands they love -- to get involved and have their opinions count.

So, we go in, we play, and we give the audience the same love we'd give for any other gig. If we don't make it to the next round, we don't assume it's because we suck. If we do make it, we realize it's not because we're better.

That said, we hope to qualify for round two, because then we get to play more. If you're in the vicinity of Tucson, please come see us and everyone else tonight.

Where: Old Town Artisans (201 N. Court Avenue, Tucson, AZ)
When: Saturday, September 19, 7 p.m. 'til whenever it ends

Hope to see you there!

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Judge: "This blog post had a compelling start, with good, reasonably entertaining arguments. The segue into cinderkeys' personal experiences with Battle of the Bands, however, was weak, and she never brought the essay back to its original point. In the end, all of the early material comes across as an excuse to promote her band and tonight's Acoustic Battle. I give the post a 6.8."

When it's time to record again

Seven or eight years ago, I stumbled across an amazing singer/songwriter named Amber Jade at an open mic. I bought her CD and began seeking out her performances.

After a few of her shows, it occurred to me that she almost never played any of the songs from her CD. I asked her why. Her response was something to the effect that her newer material was more interesting to her.

I didn't get it, but whatever. Her non-CD songs were good too.

Fast-forward to the present. Ron the Drummer and I are gearing up for this year's Acoustic Battle of the Bands. We only have 15 minutes to play, so we have to choose our songs carefully. As we deliberated during rehearsal, I realized something. My top picks didn't include one song from our album. Ron felt much the same.

Now I get it.

Set lists evolve. We have to rotate older songs out to make room for newer ones. When deciding what goes and what stays, we've given the songs from Highways and Hiking Shoes preferential treatment. Why? Part of it is that we used some of our strongest work for our album, so it floats to the top naturally. The other part is promotion. If listeners hear and like specific songs from our album, the logic goes, they'll be more likely to buy it.

We released Highways four years ago. That's four years of heavy rotation. We're still proud of those CD songs, but we're ready to play something else now.

The obvious solution is to record again. If we make another CD, it expands the number of songs that we need to promote.

We're working on ways to make this happen. Stay tuned.

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Note: Remember how, at the end of my last post, I said that "next time" I'd talk more about vagueness and specificity in songwriting? What I should have said was, I'll talk about this the next time I have a lot more time to contemplate the subject. Hopefully this weekend or next. Hang tight.