Jarrett D (Screaming Females)
SPB: What song in your active playlist requires the most practice? What part is the hardest to get down?
D: Screaming Females plays a different setlist every night. We have a catalogue of about 70 songs.
I'd like to be able to say that we could play any of those songs at any time but that's not quite true. On any given tour we have about 35 songs we are ready to play. Just the other day a kid in the crowd asked us to play a song we hadn't played in probably 3 years. We just so happened to have played it once or twice in practice the day before, so we played it for him. It went okay!
Trying to remember the order of a song, the particular beats to that song, and most importantly how the song is supposed to feel is really mind-bending sometimes. But putting aside the fact that at any given show Mike or Marissa might ask me to play a song I haven't thought about in a year or more, the hardest song we are playing right now is called “Let Me In.” It is a new song that we are going to be recording soon (Spring 2014). The song has gone through a ton of revisions and I'm pretty sure we have yet to play any version correctly at a show. The fact that it has gone through so many rewrites makes it even harder. Everything will be going fine playing it and then, suddenly, it is a mess because someone forgot that the chorus is half as long in the newest version.
Overall the order of the parts of this song is its hardest feature. It is not the type of song that is just a couple alternating sections. There is an intro, 2 versions of the chorus section, a verse that has a tough transition into and out of it, a bridge with 3 sections and another tough transition, a part were we all stop for about half a measure while Marissa just sings, and an outro. And it is fucking fast!
