I’ve got a gig playing in a mardi gras parade at the end of February. The parade is probably 45 minutes long, and I’ve got a talented crew of musicians ready to play; all I need are songs!
The songs need to:
-Be relatively simple. The amount of noise and chaos, likely very cold weather, the precarious fact of playing on the back of a moving flat bed, and the lack of adequate monitors is going to make songs with odd breaks and complicated instrumental parts less than ideal.
-Be relatively popular. The crowd will be incredibly diverse, and I want songs that will be at least sort of familiar to 80% of the crowd.
-Be consistant tempo-wise. Because we’re moving, I don’t want to do songs with sections with big breaks or lulls in energy. I’d hate to move past a section of the crowd and have them wonder what the heck we were doing.
As a guideline, last year songs we did at this gig included The Beatles’ Get Back, Spencer Davis Group’s Gimme Some Lovin’, and Cheap Trick’s I Want You To Want Me, Phish’s Chalk Dust Torture, and a few others.
Any thoughts?