MSi9W – Week 2.1 ~ my 15 second pitch… strike one!

When you’re trying to figure out who you sound like don’t ask yourself. Don’t rely on your own ear which is being filtered through your ego and your cranial bones. Ask your fans, your audience your wife your brother and even the guy who really dislikes your music. Ultimately it’s the people to whom you are playing that are the judges of what your music and voice remind them of and how they can make the connection. And it’s all about the connection.

At the beginning of the year I asked my mailing list, posted a question on Face Book and even emailed a few close friends to ask them who they thought I sounded like and who my songs reminded them of. Here’s the list I got:

Johnny Cash
Bruce Springsteen
Greg Brown
Steve Earle
John Mellencamp – (one I had never considered, but intrigued me)
Tom Petty (?!?)
Tom Waits (hmm…)
Fred Eaglesmith
The Jayhawks (sound-wise)
John Hiatt

Some of these choices I was aware of and some not so (like the Mellencamp suggestion). This list has come in handy not only in crafting my pitch, but also in the way I interact with my audience and how I use social media. When I play a in new area I will search Twitter for people who are listening to these artists and follow them. I’ve gotten a few (not a lot) people to come to gigs based on this information.

As for the pitch. I figured that my sound is an amalgam of these artists and there are some things they do that I do as well and you can “taste” that in my songs. So I thought about taste and recipe and cooking and I came up with this:

Take a little Mellencamp
Flavor with Springsteen and Earle
Throw in some Cash and a pinch of Hiatt
Cook it up over a hot flame
Sounds like Darryl Gregory
Tasty!

I like it and it’s catchy. I can say it to someone who asks what I sound like and I get a laugh and the beginning of a conversation. But as I was working on the second week of Ariel’s book I decided that I also needed something a bit more to the point and a bit more hook-y. My music leans towards the alt.country side of the dial and when I play with a full band it can be quite swampy. Yet… I have a bunch of songs that are just plain sweet. So I came up with this tag line:

Darryl Gregory
Hard edged country with a soft heart

So Ariel suggests that we commit to the pitch. We should put it on newsletters, Face Book, Twitter, press releases, in fact everything we create that comes in contact with a possible listener (check out the updated header on this blog). This is something that I will put into action and in fact this has inspired me to create a new business card. I already had one for my studio (Blue Cave Studios) but not one for me as a performer. I went to VistaPrint.com and put one together. Here it is:

I like being referred to as a raconteur – a story teller. I didn’t order a lot of these cards, so let me know what you think and if there are any tweaks you would suggest.

~Darryl