Bhumble
07-13-2005, 12:38 PM
by Corey Moss, with additional reporting by John Norris, James Montgomery and Chris Harris
On occasion, alt-rock legends the Pixies perform their songs in alphabetical order. Once, they opened with an encore and then returned for the full show, playing the songs in reverse-alphabetical order.
"I just feel that your material is your material and you should be able to win people over with your music, period," singer Frank Black explained. "The sequence is secondary."
In the competitive business that is touring, however, the Pixies' freewheeling philosophy is a rare one. Most artists, with their sights set on achieving the perfect show, meticulously craft their set lists, sometimes putting as much time and thought into the order in which they'll play the songs as the creation of the songs themselves.
What is the ultimate opening song? How do you follow it? Where do you go from there? When is the best time to slow it down? These are the questions that neurotically haunt many a touring artist.
"There is an absolute science to it and I've been studying it for four years — and I still don't know how it works completely," said John Mayer, who is touring this summer with his new John Mayer Trio. "What a set list should do is keep people satisfied the whole time. And there have been times in a set when, to a certain point, I know people aren't satisfied. And then you take songs out or put faster songs in. It really is all about keeping somebody feeling like they're in the first three songs of a show the whole time."
"If you see a band and the set list isn't right, it can ruin [the show]," Foo Fighters drummer Taylor Hawkins said. "It's like putting together a movie: There has to be some action in the beginning, then it has to let people breathe a little, then some action in the middle — and it definitely has to have action at the end."
Along with making or breaking a show, set lists can serve as a sort of souvenir, the kind of thing fanboys pass along on the Internet and analyze for months to come. Concerts reviewers also often list the set, and sometimes set-list action can even generate headlines.
When Audioslave first started touring behind Out of Exile, the band earned just as much attention for adding Rage Against the Machine and Soundgarden tunes into their show (something they hadn't done in the past) than for releasing a new record. And one would have thought Bono had shed his signature sunglasses for all the press U2 has received for including several songs from their first album, 1980's Boy, in their latest tour.
"It was great to see [fans anticipating], 'What are they going to do next?' " U2 drummer Larry Mullen Jr. said.
U2, arguably the biggest touring band of the last 20 years, are constantly thinking about their set list, even when they're in the studio.
"When we get to performing the songs, we've already figured out where it's going to fit in," Mullen said. "We knew 'City of Blinding Lights' would open the set. 'Love and Peace' may open, but would be OK two or three songs in. We're always thinking about that."
U2 will often spend entire tours tweaking their set list, discovering what works best and where. And since each of the band members has a say, they sometimes debate for weeks over whether a song should be included.
"We were wondering how you could play 'Where the Streets Have No Name' after the last tour, where we showed the names of those who died in 9-11," Bono said, giving an example of the amount of thought put behind a single song. "Our show designer said we shouldn't do 'Streets.' And then we started working on this idea of a suite of songs that joined the dots between what was happening in the civil rights movement in the U.S. in the '60s and '70s when Martin Luther King was taking to the streets, and what's happening now in Africa."
When determining a set list, the first step is usually choosing the show opener, which is widely considered the most important song of the show. At a multi-stage festival, where music fans have other options, it's even more crucial.
"We like to come onstage with a dramatic, high-energy entrance, because you want to wake people up and go, 'Yeah! Here we are!' " Franz Ferdinand singer Alexander Kapranos said. "We'd probably never start with a slow ballad."
Most bands follow a similar rule, although not all.
"Jane's Addiction, back in the day, opened with the first song on Nothing's Shocking," Hawkins said of the slow near-instrumental "Up the Beach." "It depends who the band is. If you go see Radiohead, you want there to be some sort of pomp and circumstance, but if you see Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, you expect those guys to stroll on stage and spend the first minute counting out the song."
Foo Fighters tend to open with the first track from their most recent album, and this summer is no exception. In fact, Grohl, who writes all of Foo's set lists, had that in mind when he wrote the opening, title track to In Your Honor.
"He's really good at sh-- like that," Hawkins said of Grohl. "He's very organized. He did the set lists for Nirvana too."
While many bands work out their set lists together, it's not uncommon for one member to take on the responsibility. Drummers (as Grohl was with Nirvana) like to at least have a say, because they know what they can physically handle. "There might be three particular songs that you couldn't do in a row, for example, otherwise it would kill Paul [Thomson]," Kapranos said of Franz's drummer.
"The goal is to sustain that sort of energy, but not exhaust ourselves," Thomson added.
Sustaining that energy is the hard part, which is why even the best bands have lulls in their shows.
"If you get complaints that the bathrooms are overflowing [with people], you know it's a bad song," Coldplay's Chris Martin joked. "We have someone monitoring the door — 'Chris, the gentlemen's is really crowded!' — then we just stop that one."
"The best shows I've ever been to had a beginning and then an end," John Mayer mused. "The worst thing about a show is the middle — and if you [get bogged down] in the middle of the set list, it's time to change the set list and just go to the end."
The best strategy for surviving the middle, according to Killers guitarist David Keuning, is to spread out the hits. "You start with a couple hits, you end with a hit, and you spread a few out in the middle," he said. "It's not random, but it's not complicated either."
With his years of scientific study, Mayer has found what he believes to be the most effective spot for the biggest hit.
"The best place, I believe, is second to last [in the main set, not the encore]," he said. "That's like baseball's clean-up hitter. It says, 'I care about holding this off, but it's not my bread and butter.' "
There are exceptions, however. "If you feel like a rag doll of the industry, if you feel like a puppet — you play your hit first," he explained. "If you ever go to see a band and they play their hit first, they're pissed off. Their record-company people are in the audience, and the band is pissed off at 'em and saying, 'This is what we think of having a hit.' "
Most bands, though, are more respectful of their hits and give them the best slots in their sets. "We owe everything to 'Yellow' and 'Clocks,' and 'Scientist,' a bit," said Coldplay's Martin. "[Ignoring them] would be like slapping your best friends."
"People wonder, if you have a choice between 200 songs, then why are you playing from a list of 35?" Bono said. "There are a few bases you have to hit."
Most bands, including U2, save at least one hit for the encore, although some bands still refuse to take encores for granted
"You should only ever do an encore if people actually want you to get back on the stage," said Kapranos of Franz Ferdinand, who never save singles for the encore. "It's difficult because you want your encore to be good if you're going to get one, [but you don't want it to be] too planned out in advance."
Franz Ferdinand do like to keep their options open, and have on occasion based entire shows around requests.
"The sound guy and the lighting guy hate that, because they don't know [what they're supposed to be doing], but those can be some of the most thrilling shows to do, because they're so unpredictable," Kapranos said.
Although he's not one for requests, Frank Black's shows are similarly unpredictable. For the eight years he toured with his band the Catholics (before the Pixies reunited), he never wrote out a set list, but rather just called out each song randomly.
The Pixies like to have a list written out, although Black puts it together randomly in the amount of minutes it takes to "remember all the names."
The science of doing a set list, that feels too contrived to me," Black said. " 'Well, first we'll start off like this, and then we'll hit them with the old one-two, and then we're gonna tug on their heartstrings over here, and we'll get them on their feet at the end.' It feels a little too ass-kissy. We're not from that ilk, the Pixies — we're more anti. It's a little more arty, a little more intellectual."
Black sometimes puts old-school Pixies favorites like "Where Is My Mind?" or "Gigantic" at the end of a show because he knows they make good closers, but just as often he consciously puts them in the middle "just to break out of that."
"I would say we wouldn't put all the fast songs together and then all the slow songs together, but you know what? I've done that before," Black said. "When I go to a show, the only thing I'm paying attention to is that moment — the song that I'm listening to now."
And therein lies the difference between Black and John Mayer, who is always paying attention to the show — particularly when it's going to end.
"I have the shortest attention span known to man," Mayer explained. "I'll wait months to go see a show, and I'll be like, 'I can't wait! Here they come on stage!' And by the second song, I'm doing the math, constantly gauging how long until they're done. And so, when I write the set list out, I'm thinking exactly like that. How can I ADD your ADD?"
On occasion, alt-rock legends the Pixies perform their songs in alphabetical order. Once, they opened with an encore and then returned for the full show, playing the songs in reverse-alphabetical order.
"I just feel that your material is your material and you should be able to win people over with your music, period," singer Frank Black explained. "The sequence is secondary."
In the competitive business that is touring, however, the Pixies' freewheeling philosophy is a rare one. Most artists, with their sights set on achieving the perfect show, meticulously craft their set lists, sometimes putting as much time and thought into the order in which they'll play the songs as the creation of the songs themselves.
What is the ultimate opening song? How do you follow it? Where do you go from there? When is the best time to slow it down? These are the questions that neurotically haunt many a touring artist.
"There is an absolute science to it and I've been studying it for four years — and I still don't know how it works completely," said John Mayer, who is touring this summer with his new John Mayer Trio. "What a set list should do is keep people satisfied the whole time. And there have been times in a set when, to a certain point, I know people aren't satisfied. And then you take songs out or put faster songs in. It really is all about keeping somebody feeling like they're in the first three songs of a show the whole time."
"If you see a band and the set list isn't right, it can ruin [the show]," Foo Fighters drummer Taylor Hawkins said. "It's like putting together a movie: There has to be some action in the beginning, then it has to let people breathe a little, then some action in the middle — and it definitely has to have action at the end."
Along with making or breaking a show, set lists can serve as a sort of souvenir, the kind of thing fanboys pass along on the Internet and analyze for months to come. Concerts reviewers also often list the set, and sometimes set-list action can even generate headlines.
When Audioslave first started touring behind Out of Exile, the band earned just as much attention for adding Rage Against the Machine and Soundgarden tunes into their show (something they hadn't done in the past) than for releasing a new record. And one would have thought Bono had shed his signature sunglasses for all the press U2 has received for including several songs from their first album, 1980's Boy, in their latest tour.
"It was great to see [fans anticipating], 'What are they going to do next?' " U2 drummer Larry Mullen Jr. said.
U2, arguably the biggest touring band of the last 20 years, are constantly thinking about their set list, even when they're in the studio.
"When we get to performing the songs, we've already figured out where it's going to fit in," Mullen said. "We knew 'City of Blinding Lights' would open the set. 'Love and Peace' may open, but would be OK two or three songs in. We're always thinking about that."
U2 will often spend entire tours tweaking their set list, discovering what works best and where. And since each of the band members has a say, they sometimes debate for weeks over whether a song should be included.
"We were wondering how you could play 'Where the Streets Have No Name' after the last tour, where we showed the names of those who died in 9-11," Bono said, giving an example of the amount of thought put behind a single song. "Our show designer said we shouldn't do 'Streets.' And then we started working on this idea of a suite of songs that joined the dots between what was happening in the civil rights movement in the U.S. in the '60s and '70s when Martin Luther King was taking to the streets, and what's happening now in Africa."
When determining a set list, the first step is usually choosing the show opener, which is widely considered the most important song of the show. At a multi-stage festival, where music fans have other options, it's even more crucial.
"We like to come onstage with a dramatic, high-energy entrance, because you want to wake people up and go, 'Yeah! Here we are!' " Franz Ferdinand singer Alexander Kapranos said. "We'd probably never start with a slow ballad."
Most bands follow a similar rule, although not all.
"Jane's Addiction, back in the day, opened with the first song on Nothing's Shocking," Hawkins said of the slow near-instrumental "Up the Beach." "It depends who the band is. If you go see Radiohead, you want there to be some sort of pomp and circumstance, but if you see Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, you expect those guys to stroll on stage and spend the first minute counting out the song."
Foo Fighters tend to open with the first track from their most recent album, and this summer is no exception. In fact, Grohl, who writes all of Foo's set lists, had that in mind when he wrote the opening, title track to In Your Honor.
"He's really good at sh-- like that," Hawkins said of Grohl. "He's very organized. He did the set lists for Nirvana too."
While many bands work out their set lists together, it's not uncommon for one member to take on the responsibility. Drummers (as Grohl was with Nirvana) like to at least have a say, because they know what they can physically handle. "There might be three particular songs that you couldn't do in a row, for example, otherwise it would kill Paul [Thomson]," Kapranos said of Franz's drummer.
"The goal is to sustain that sort of energy, but not exhaust ourselves," Thomson added.
Sustaining that energy is the hard part, which is why even the best bands have lulls in their shows.
"If you get complaints that the bathrooms are overflowing [with people], you know it's a bad song," Coldplay's Chris Martin joked. "We have someone monitoring the door — 'Chris, the gentlemen's is really crowded!' — then we just stop that one."
"The best shows I've ever been to had a beginning and then an end," John Mayer mused. "The worst thing about a show is the middle — and if you [get bogged down] in the middle of the set list, it's time to change the set list and just go to the end."
The best strategy for surviving the middle, according to Killers guitarist David Keuning, is to spread out the hits. "You start with a couple hits, you end with a hit, and you spread a few out in the middle," he said. "It's not random, but it's not complicated either."
With his years of scientific study, Mayer has found what he believes to be the most effective spot for the biggest hit.
"The best place, I believe, is second to last [in the main set, not the encore]," he said. "That's like baseball's clean-up hitter. It says, 'I care about holding this off, but it's not my bread and butter.' "
There are exceptions, however. "If you feel like a rag doll of the industry, if you feel like a puppet — you play your hit first," he explained. "If you ever go to see a band and they play their hit first, they're pissed off. Their record-company people are in the audience, and the band is pissed off at 'em and saying, 'This is what we think of having a hit.' "
Most bands, though, are more respectful of their hits and give them the best slots in their sets. "We owe everything to 'Yellow' and 'Clocks,' and 'Scientist,' a bit," said Coldplay's Martin. "[Ignoring them] would be like slapping your best friends."
"People wonder, if you have a choice between 200 songs, then why are you playing from a list of 35?" Bono said. "There are a few bases you have to hit."
Most bands, including U2, save at least one hit for the encore, although some bands still refuse to take encores for granted
"You should only ever do an encore if people actually want you to get back on the stage," said Kapranos of Franz Ferdinand, who never save singles for the encore. "It's difficult because you want your encore to be good if you're going to get one, [but you don't want it to be] too planned out in advance."
Franz Ferdinand do like to keep their options open, and have on occasion based entire shows around requests.
"The sound guy and the lighting guy hate that, because they don't know [what they're supposed to be doing], but those can be some of the most thrilling shows to do, because they're so unpredictable," Kapranos said.
Although he's not one for requests, Frank Black's shows are similarly unpredictable. For the eight years he toured with his band the Catholics (before the Pixies reunited), he never wrote out a set list, but rather just called out each song randomly.
The Pixies like to have a list written out, although Black puts it together randomly in the amount of minutes it takes to "remember all the names."
The science of doing a set list, that feels too contrived to me," Black said. " 'Well, first we'll start off like this, and then we'll hit them with the old one-two, and then we're gonna tug on their heartstrings over here, and we'll get them on their feet at the end.' It feels a little too ass-kissy. We're not from that ilk, the Pixies — we're more anti. It's a little more arty, a little more intellectual."
Black sometimes puts old-school Pixies favorites like "Where Is My Mind?" or "Gigantic" at the end of a show because he knows they make good closers, but just as often he consciously puts them in the middle "just to break out of that."
"I would say we wouldn't put all the fast songs together and then all the slow songs together, but you know what? I've done that before," Black said. "When I go to a show, the only thing I'm paying attention to is that moment — the song that I'm listening to now."
And therein lies the difference between Black and John Mayer, who is always paying attention to the show — particularly when it's going to end.
"I have the shortest attention span known to man," Mayer explained. "I'll wait months to go see a show, and I'll be like, 'I can't wait! Here they come on stage!' And by the second song, I'm doing the math, constantly gauging how long until they're done. And so, when I write the set list out, I'm thinking exactly like that. How can I ADD your ADD?"