Northern Tier

Any performer who has ever been on stage looks for ways to connect with an audience. In some cases they go a little far. In other cases audience connection doesn’t matter at all.

I’ll break it down but I’m betting you’ve probably seen it. The new-ish band who has really only interacted with themselves in the music making process finally has to confront total strangers on the stage. They set up slowly – this set is running about 10 minutes behind already – and they do a quick line check and tune. Then comes the opening talk. The band introduces themselves for what seems like minutes. Then we get a song. Followed immediately by another speech. It goes on like this until the set is done. Thirty minutes have gone by. Four songs have been played. After the first speech, about a dozen people have all headed towards the bar. The band has failed to adequately retain their attention. They’ve lost the crowd.

What are they even talking about up there? Everything. The act is curated and definitely rehearsed about as much as it can be. Other bands might mark spots in their set list where they would have talk breaks. After the first two tracks, the opener, say hey and maybe introduce yourselves. Also tune if you need to. After the fourth and fifth song you might thank the venue and remind the crowd to tip the bartender (big points for this usually). You might push the merch at the table in back. You might say who’s on next and stick around for them or whatever. These bands however are more confessional. After the first track their pushing merch. After the second they’re talking openly about their struggles with anxiety and depression and trying to get crowd reaction to these topics. I have even witnessed a band instigate an in crowd therapy session.

I suspect there could be a few things happening here.

First, the band is nervous and doesn’t have enough music. They knew they didn’t have enough music going into this to fill a set but booked the show anyway. They have a total of four songs worth of original material and came to play. Their set end to end tops out at probably fifteen minutes. Not nearly enough to make a crowd happy.

Secondly, the evolution of music has led to a changing in the expectations of performance of said music. The way in which bands and artists go about cultivating fans isn’t through traditional media and live shows. They’re on social media. Some have streams and such. The end point of doing the whole band thing used to be getting on stage and now that anyone can do that they don’t need to have an ultra refined product to present. So, live shows are pitches now. An extension of the promotion bands are already doing online and elsewhere.

Third, this is probably spillover from the open mic crowd. Open mics are generally short length performance spaces where the impact an artist has is directly proportionate to how memorable they were. Also not having a band for support in a solo setting means a lot of quiet spaces need to be filled or you will absolutely lose the crowd to that bar over there. But then again you could just play more music.

By the end of the show you’ve heard maybe four songs with three interstitial speeches leading to about 30 minutes of total performance time.