I think, as others have said, that even if you know 100 song you played/composed for your band it must be hard for any hired musicians.
I remember watching the Bee Gees’ “Live by request” and thinking “they’ve been playing for 50 years, how can th eother guys know the songs?”. Of course none of the songs requested where obscure b-sides from 1971, but still…
Thanks for the responses everyone. Maybe something I had forgotten explains the Saves the Day incident (although their setlist does not vary too much come to think of it so that might explain it, too.)
They were playing an acoustic appearance. So maybe they didn’t memorize all of their songs acoustically (although they did beg off a couple requests as well by saying they didn’t go well acoustically.) Even though it would seem easier to memorize it that way since they play the kind of music that is more likely to originally be composed acoustically.
Yo La Tengo is famous for taking caller requests during fundraisers for WFMU and being able to play virtually any song requested. As others have noted above, however, the “concert-ready” catalog can vary wildly from artist to artist.
Checked with a friend who’s one of Peru’s top bass players. He told me that he can play 1500 songs without breaking a sweat and possibly the same number with a bit of effort.
I’ve seen him play 7 hours’ worth of music straight without sheet music.
I saw a Bruce Hornsby show where they took requests not only of songs, but styles. Like, “Do More Than a Feeling as Reggae”.
Of course the trick was they hadn’t memorized anything but the main melodies of a zillion pop songs. They were all just such great improvisational musicians that they could make it up on the fly and make it credible and enjoyable.
It’s probably easier to do that with other groups’ music. Their fans know every note of their own music, so they might upset the audience if they go too far astray. But other music – they just won’t be held to the same standard by the audience.
Back in my early 20s, when I performed frequently at open-mike nights at local bars, I had a catalog of around 200 songs that I could do at any time (I accompanied myself on acoustic guitar while I sang, solo). I hated performing the same songs for the same audience every week, so I tried to mix it up by doing a few crowd favorites and filling out my set with different songs. I did bring a book of lyrics with me when I performed and I would crack it open if I was going to do a song that I wasn’t completely confident about remembering all the words.
Mind you, I was doing my own arrangements of the songs, and my guitar playing was nothing fancy. This was also during a time of my life when most of my spare time was spent playing my guitar and singing (pre-Internet and all that). My material was mostly country music, and my guitar playing was very simplified, i.e. I just played the basic chord structures of the songs, rather than try to duplicate the original artist’s playing).
These open-mike nights usually followed a pattern, where each individual performer would do a solo set, and once everybody had taken a turn we’d move on to group jams/singalongs. So in addition to my own repertoire, I also learned a lot of other songs well enough back up the other guys on bass guitar and sing harmonies on quite a few songs.
The biggest problem I had with knowing so many songs was choosing which ones to perform on a given night. I started out just picking songs on the fly as I went along, but indecision/my mood/how the audience was responding/how things were flowing meant I often wasted too much time between songs while I tried to decide what to sing next. So after a while I got in the habit of selecting a set list ahead of time so that I could quickly segue from one song to the next.
Nowadays my only “public” playing is done at my church, where I’ve been the bass player on the worship team for about 15 years, playing with the same core group of musicians for that whole time. We have a huge repertoire that we’ve put together over the years and I’ve developed my own bass lines for every song. However, several weeks may go by without doing the same song twice, so I’ve memorized very few of the songs. We play from just lyrics with the chords written in, and that bare-bones “score” is enough of a guide that I can remember what I usually play on each song. Same for the other musicians in the group.
So yeah, if you’re spending most of your time playing your music, it’s really not difficult to stay sharp and remember how to play everything.