3 steps to better stage banter at your next show
Lots of musicians are comfy-cozy when it comes to playing through their songs on stage, but they freeze up when they have to tell a story, thank the crowd, draw attention to merch, or ask for email signups.
I’ve been one of those artists myself. In fact, I felt like I had a few “uhhh, what should I say now?” moments at my gig this past Friday night.
For artists like me who feel like the between-song banter is the hard part, Wade Sutton of Rocket to the Stars has posted a series of videos (embedded below) all about the art of talking to your audience.
Individually, they’re on the long-side for your average YouTube video — about 15 minutes each. But I think they’re worth watching, as Wade expounds on three main points:
1. You should practice your storytelling, jokes, banter, and calls-to-action as part of your rehearsal
2. You should NOT memorize your on-stage dialog verbatim
3. You should pay careful attention to your sentence structure and put the most important, resonant, hilarious, or heartbreaking phrases at the END of your monologues (or dialogs)
Anyways, that’s an oversimplified summary of his advice.
Check out his videos below for more details and examples, plus an explanation of WHY these things are crucial to putting on a good show.
How have you improved your speaking skills between songs? Let me know in the comments below.
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Chris Robley is an acclaimed singer-songwriter and award-winning poet from Maine.
His Beatlesque indie-pop and milltown Americana songs have been praised by The Associated Press, No Depression, KCRW, The LA Times, Boston Globe, NPR, American Songwriter, and others.
His poems have appeared in Poetry Magazine, Prairie Schooner, The Poetry Review, and more.
Robley has received a Maine Literary Award in Poetry, Boulevard’s Emerging Writers Prize for Poetry, and in 2016 was selected by former US-poet laureate Robert Pinsky as a finalist for the Dorset Prize.