Song Fight! Live 2016 New York July 16th and 17th

[PepperJane]

Sweet! I'll be the lost looking Australian with a blue hat and python boots and I guess I'll have to bring my guitar I'll aim to be at the 'gate'(?) at that time. WiFi will be patchy after i leave the hostel

[PepperJane]

Who else is coming?!

[jb]

Anyone up for meeting up for lunch at the Smorgasburg tomorrow?

http://brooklynflea.com/markets/smorgasburg/

Dorie and I are meeting one of her friends at Smorgasburg after 2:00. (Taking the time until then to try to write a Good Luck Charm.)

JB

[ElaineDiMasi]

I can bring drum stuff sunday. My cymbals are already packed in a box from moving house. I'll throw them in my car for sunday just in case.

[jb]

I can bring drum stuff sunday. My cymbals are already packed in a box from moving house. I'll throw them in my car for sunday just in case.

That's great, Elaine! Thanks! I'm sure Niveous will find that a relief.

JB

[Holly Furlone]

I just got to Brooklyn! I'll be on my way!

[Lunkhead]

How's the show going? Any live stream setup for those of us who couldn't make it? Hope you're having a blast!

[jb]

Roymond's a liar.

[Niveous]

A blast was had at night one of Songfight Live 2016: Touch and Go. We had the LiveFight. The winners were Lucky Witch and the Righteous Ghost (which is me and my girlfriend). Then we had a killer night of Songfight Open Mic. On to Sidewalk!

[PepperJane]

Roymond's a liar.

And lyrical genius

[arby]

slight correction dear, I'm the Lucky Witch and you're the Righteous Ghost

[Caravan Ray]

Roymond's a liar.

And lyrical genius

Raise that bar Roymond.

[ElaineDiMasi]

I can bring drum stuff sunday. My cymbals are already packed in a box from moving house. I'll throw them in my car for sunday just in case.

That's great, Elaine! Thanks! I'm sure Niveous will find that a relief.
JB

Hey guys, before I commit to driving in and to being at the show early to late - can you tell me exactly what you need me to bring? and that you really need me to bring it.
I don't have a hats clutch, I have an integral hi-hat with pedal in the stand. Can bring that, a throne, cymbals. I can bring a snare and stand but you might not love it (it's metal and has a loud bark).

EDIT: Ok, I read the SIdewalk backline page, and will bring what we need

[roymond]

Roymond's a liar.

And lyrical genius

Raise that bar Roymond.

I have no idea but will gladly take credit or accolades.

[jb]

Sockpuppet, backed by Pepper Jane and Spud.

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[arby]

everyone is killing it tonight at SW!!

[fluffy]

Sockpuppet, backed by Pepper Jane and Spud.

And for those who are wondering who that amazing drummer was, that's Paul Starr, my oldest friend. We've known each other since we were 12. :) I'm always trying to get him to enter into Song Fight. Maybe now I'll succeed.

Tonight was a total blast. Everyone sounded amazing, thanks in no small part to Ben Krieger's amazing soundboard work. The show may have been a bit Touch & Go for a while but the end result was wonderful. Thanks Niveous for running this shin-dig and the Sidewalk for hosting us and for everyone for bringing the ROCK.

[roymond]

There was a groove this year that felt really great. Thanks, Niveous, Ben, and all youse fighters.

- Holly's infectious glad-to-be-alive spirit.
- Pepper Jane's I-can-do-anything spirit.
- Fluffy's not-newly-found-but-now-wholly-owned-identity which shined. Really, you're a new person Fluffy! Good to see.
- The Howling Monkey's fancy jazz chords and lovely blonde ES-125ish guitar. Sweet!
- You'll be hearing/seeing more of Heather on drums & percussion. She's a trooper and totally owned the role after two one hour rehearsals. Distilling my layered productions to G&P is easy with someone so talented.
- Niveous sounding and looking sharp! Now we know why. Brooks is a class act. And an Omnichord? OMG.
- Cavedwellers rocking after so many years. I didn't really catch the whole backstory, but songfight discussions now typically cover decades and here's one reason.
- Jim Tyrrell - I think this was the least drinking-song set I've heard of yours, and certainly the best. Not because of the lack of drinking songs, but these songs had wonderful depth and of course your execution is just fabulous. And the black Martin? RAWK!
- Ben pulling classics-to-be-but-missed-the-deadline out of a hat, which seem to reproduce like bunnies in his head.
- Menage A Garage will be hearing from my ENT doctor. It won't stop bleeding!

[Niveous]

What a wild weekend it was!

Mise En Place was a great locale for a FUBU (For Us, By Us) night. The live fight was full of great music including Pepper Jane in 7/4 time.

Brookes and I are still reeling from the fact we won the live fight. Thank you so much. It was the first song we wrote together as Lucky Witch and the Righteous Ghost.

The Open Mic portion was a blast! Got a mini Elaine DiMasi set. Got an # song. LW/RG started an "Under The Milky Way" singalong. Holly was awesome and earned a fan in me. JB closing the night with his "What We Need More of is Science". Such a great night from top to bottom.

The next night at Sidewalk was exceptional. I'll write more about that later today and see if I can link up some of the music.

[ElaineDiMasi]

Bootlegger Girl missed the first half of the Cave and definitely the last half of the Garage (maybe all? recorder was disturbed), but probably got everything that went in between.

Generally I make these bootlegs for myself, but I will entertain requests|threats|bribes for mp3's|file deletions|48kHz output for video remix.

Great to reunite/meet you all!

[truth]

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This is Lee from Cavedwellers and Yardley Social Scene. I wanted to thank Niveous and Ben and Elaine and the distant 'dwellers for directly helping make my experience so positive. I wanted to also thank and commend all the great musicians I had the pleasure of hearing and meeting over the past two days. What a talented, far-flung family.

[fluffy]

I am writing this at about 20,000 feet on my way back to Seattle, and I just want to say how wonderful this year's Song Fight! Live was. So many thanks to the people who made it special - Niveous for putting it on, Sidewalk and Mise En Place for hosting us, Ben Krieger for doing an amazing job at sound, Holly for trusting me to play drums on a few of her songs without any rehearsal, and of course Spud, Pepper Jane, and Paul for doing such an amazing job of backing me up on my set.

I also want to talk a bit about my set, perhaps a bit self-indulgently, because this was an incredibly important show for me and I am so very glad that I was able to share it with so many of you. And I think there's some background information about why it's so important.

Back in March was when I finally fully "came out" to everyone at Song Fight about some gender stuff, although this isn't actually anything new for anyone who's been paying attention (I pointed one thing out to Niveous the other day that suddenly clicked for him, for example, and if you go back and look at my "shadowy puppetmaster" posts there's plenty of stuff to notice as well).

Back when I joined Song Fight! I was pretty outspoken about my gender identity, although I hadn't quite figured out what it was, and even back then most people were pretty accepting, or at least indifferent in an "eh, whatever" sort of way. The oldest song I played on my set, Fool in the Middle, was explicitly about me still trying to figure some stuff out, both in terms of the Song Fight! community, but also about gender stuff; long before the term "non-binary" had come into common usage or before I even know I wasn't the only one who felt this way:

One side pink and one side blue, purple's gonna have to do.

When I first came to my first Song Fight! Live (Seattle, 2003) I was completely unwilling to be referred to by my first name at the time, as it did not fit my identity at all. I didn't really know what to go by, though, and it was at that time that Spud decided that I would just be known as "fluffy" (I think it was him treating "fluffy porcupine" as a person-name rather than a band-name, but I like to think that it was more about how my tendency at the time was to use "fluffy" as a placeholder-name for a lot of stuff I didn't feel like naming, and I was going by "fluffy grue" on a few forums and so on). Some folks did end up learning my "real" name and insisted on calling me by that but I never felt at all comfortable with it. But I liked being called "fluffy," so much so that I adopted it as my full-time nickname and pretty much all of my friends have only known me as that.

In March some things finally got set into motion that led me to finally coming up with a Real Name for myself – Jayden – which pretty much everyone knows now. And I am totally fine with people calling me that, or I am totally fine with them still calling me "fluffy," or whatever. And my set this year was in large part an attempt at celebrating my gender journey and finally becoming comfortable with myself and my identity and the fact that so many others in Song Fight are so wonderful about it.

Not all of my songs this year were about this process specifically, but here's my set list and what each of the songs mean to me:

• Come Out: Nothing about gender (although I guess the title is fitting), but it's a fun song that I like a lot. Also it's one that I didn't finish in time for the deadline and ended up finishing about a year later.
• Fool in the Middle: well, see above. Oh and I'd been taking a break from Song Fight! when I wrote this one and when I returned to the forums (shortly before the fight went up), Frankie's first words to me were, "Welcome back, you crazy broad!" So, that was fitting...
• Sometimes It's Hard To Keep Yourself Moving: This one was about my job in San Francisco, and my general fatigue problems and ongoing battle with trying to figure out what I want to be when I grow up.
• Meat Grinder: This song is about the internal conflict between my hippie tendencies and my yuppie tendencies; of course, the only time I refer to anyone with pronouns, it's the singular "they."
• Adding up to Nothing: This is one of my many "brain problems" songs. Specifically about how obsessive I get about things to the point of self-destruction.
• Night Terrors: I explained this at the show but it's about sleep paralysis – the underlying mechanism that causes, well, night terrors. I used to get them a lot, and many of them revolved around gender-related angst. I hardly ever get them anymore.
• Run Faster: This was about the job I had when I lived/worked in NYC. It was pretty stressful.
• Rhymes with Lucia: Another gender song, in multiple ways; I released the original version as <3, which was one of my many experiments in figuring out my own gender shit and playing with alternate identities (which is what eventually led to the Sockpuppet concept that I've been releasing under ever since). This came crashing down when someone did some sleuthing and figured out that <3 was really me, and outed me – and in doing so also continued to propagate a rather sour misgendering, as there were a lot of people who were treating the <3 persona as feminine and then afterwards I actually got a few PMs from folks who were all "I was so disappointed to find out 'she' was a guy, I had the hots for 'her'" and so on. I had a bit of an emotional breakdown over this. And the thing is that the lyrics had always been about a suicidal transgender teenager who drowned herself while trying to self-actualize – so in later versions (including the one I performed) I made this a bit more explicit ("what I mean, what I seen, she had been in-between"). So, it's a pretty personal song for a bunch of reasons.
• Strangers: So... My grandma developed dementia starting in her 60s. My mom is in her 60s and starting to show signs of dementia. I worry that I might go that way as well. And, the narrator of the song is very specifically not gendered (and I try to use my best androgyne voice whenever I sing this one); sure, the spouse is male-identified, but if you assumed that made the narrator female you should probably check your assumptions. ;)

Thank you, everyone, for being such an important part of my journey.