Tom Jackson is an expert in helping musicians and songwriters improve their performance skills. Earlier this month at our DIY Musician Conference in Chicago, Tom worked with the Toronto-based band Running Red Lights, guiding them through a bunch of small changes to their arrangement, presentation, and onstage movement that cumulatively took their song delivery from serviceable to captivating.
Tom just posted two video clips of his band makeover workshop with Running Red Lights. As he says, “You can use these techniques to take your show to the next level,” and it’s true; every time I’ve seen Tom work with an artist, no matter what the genre, it’s easy to see how his concepts and adjustments can translate to all performers.
We captured a pro-looking video of this workshop that Tom will eventually make available to his backstage members, but there’s some decent smartphone footage that conveys his points well enough, and it’s worth watching the whole way through. Check it out HERE at Tom’s website.
Also, listen to episode #43 of the DIY Musician Podcast for an interview with Tom Jackson about creating moments onstage.
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.