I played a show in Atlanta this past Saturday. It was, in many ways, a disaster. The number and variety of things that went wrong was truly impressive. First, I had a cold. I’d had it for more than a week and kept hoping I’d get past it, but, somehow, it was still hanging on. Which meant that, at various points, my voice was unreliable (and quiet), my breathing congested, and I could barely hear myself sing. But I’d armed myself with a whole host of backing musicians. My friend Allison Adams had agreed to sing and play me, and she was also backing the other musician on the bill – who had two others joining as well. So the night before we had one big rehearsal and Cyndi Craven and Billy Gewin (fantastic songwriters and musician, as is Allison) agreed to play and sing on most of my songs as well. Still, for the first few songs, the ones I was playing solo, it was difficult to get more than a croak out of my voice. Second, we had sound problems like you wouldn’t believe. We got to the venue plenty early – there were four of us to set up, and each person was planning to play multiple instruments. And the venue has a pretty cool sound system and lots of equipment. But it also was in the transition from the experienced sound person to the new person who was taking over. And when no setup (much less sound check) had started by 7:20 for an 8 p.m. show (for which the doors opened at 7:30) we sprang into gear, trying to get things set up on our own. It took forever, and the wrong cords were used for some things, or plugged into places that didn’t work (the cool sound system has some known difficulties, except people couldn’t remember which bits didn’t work). The biggest (although not only) problem was with my guitar. The one I travel with has a passive pickup and it’s been known to be hard to amplify sufficiently, so I would have liked to check it first, but we ended up checking it last – the sound check was still going at 8:20). We thought we had it running, but by the end of the first song or two it was clear that it wasn’t. And we couldn’t figure out why, so we swapped my guitar to Allison’s DI, which seemed, briefly, to work. But although we’d had troubles with it at sound check and had fixed them by changing the battery, my guitar then started having problems of distortion. After considering some of the possible causes – My tuner? (We took that out of the setup and it still wasn’t working.) The cables? (They were Allison’s, and new.) – we concluded that the battery we’d been given when the first one was dead was itself old, and it died. So we got a new new battery and got it working again. Third, just because everything else was going wrong, the callus on my ring finger decided to tear off – leaving extremely unprotected skin – towards the end of my set. I could feel it about to tear and paid attention to how I was moving my fingers on the strings in hopes of keeping it on as long as possible . . . but, still, with a couple songs to go it tore off. Ouch! But adrenaline is an impressive drug; when you have to keep going, you can. Finally, it was simply hard, with all of that going on, to maintain focus. In a perfect world, I like to have a sound check (done before the audience arrives) to get everything set up and then have a few quiet moments to myself to get myself prepared for the show. Being onstage, 20 minutes late with an antsy audience and the announcer ready to introduce the show the second we had the sound working, is not quite the way I hope to get ready for a show. But here’s the thing. The audience didn’t experience it as nearly as big a disaster as it felt like to me. I made a video of the performance and certainly by the second half, when we had all the microphones working and my voice decided to show up, it actually sounds pretty good. Even though I was rattled the whole time I did my best not to show it or comment too much on it (although the various dances we did moving mikes and DIs around and swapping out tuner and batteries was hard to miss . . .). A musician in the audience later said it was the sort of show that builds character. At minimum, though, it was good practice for how to keep going even when it feels like everything is falling down around you . . . and to always remember that the audience never realizes the extent of the chaos. I’ve posted a few videos on my facebook page (and/or facebook fan page), so you can see for yourself whether I managed to pull that off by the end of the show.