In the first part of my series about my journey to Oslo Ukulele Festival, I told you how I got myself into this amazing opportunity. Today I want to blog about figuring out my setlist.
When Stine from Oslo Ukulele Festival told me, that I would be playing for half an hour, my first thought was “What am I going to play?”. My original songs are all pretty long (4-5 min) so that doesn’t give much room for a lot of songs. Also, do I even have enough original songs that would be “good” or “interesting” enough to play.
Some songs, I instantly knew that I wanted to play:
- When I first met you
- Monkey Monkey Elephant
- One Day
- and one of my more serious songs like You’re Enough, Fraud Police or Empty Shell
That’s about 17 minutes. So I thought two more songs will make my set complete. But somehow there were no more of my own songs, that I thought would be a good addition to the ones mentioned above. So I decided to add two cover songs.
Those of you who’ve been following me for a while, probably noticed, that the cover songs I do, are usually not songs, that everybody knows and can sing along to. So deciding to play two cover songs was actually difficult for me. Should it be something that people will recognize and sing along to? Or is it ok to have two covers that no one will realize are actually covers – will that make me a fraud…
I did finally decide on two covers, that probably not a lot of people will recognize. And it was actually the advice of a very nice colleague if mine, that made me decide. He said, that if people don’t know the song, it will be just the same as my original songs – something new for them to enjoy and it probably doesn’t matter to them who wrote the song. And those who might recognize the songs, will probably be happy, that I play this not so well known song that they really like. I guess that’s a really nice approach to it.
My vocal coach then suggested, I prepare an additional 7th song – just in case. This will be a cover as well, but something a bit more people will know. I don’t want to spoil too much, so the three cover songs will remain a secret, but at least my setlist is done 🙂
I also thought about the order of the songs, but haven’t made a final decision yet.
xoxo Nikky
PS: Let me know in the comments, how you approach your setlists.