I’ve talked before about how my approach to learning lines for a show involves recording all my lines and then listening to them when I drive to and from theaters, the same way I learn my songs for shows.

So in the past week or two, I was reached out to by a local cover band, local-ish, a New Jersey cover band, that performs a decent amount.

It’s like a seven or eight piece band.

They’ve got some horns.

And they cover classic rock, 90s, 80s, whatever.

And they’re like, we have a gig at Locals, which is a bar right by my house, and our singer isn’t available, our male singer, because they have two singers, one male, one female.

Would you fill in?

And I was like, well, let me see your set list.

And they sent the set list.

And there were about 18 to 20 songs they wanted me to do, about half of which I knew.

And I was like, yeah, I’ll do this.

I got to learn some.

And I was really stressing, how do I learn all those songs?

I already know for sure I’m not going to learn the lyrics.

That’s not part of the challenge.

Everybody uses iPads or iPhones to see the lyrics of the songs they’re singing in bands, in cover bands these days.

It’s embarrassing, but it is what it is.

But how am I going to learn the melodies?

Your Daily Lex The answer, unsurprisingly, is listening to the songs a lot.

And what I decided was I have to listen to all the songs all the time.

But I also still have to be doing prep for Jagged Little Pill, which we’ll get to in a minute.

So I’ve just been, you know, sometimes spending time listening to that playlist, and I always shuffle it so that it’s not always the same songs from the beginning of the playlist or whatever.

And because I don’t know all the words to all the songs, I’m doing a lot of gibberish singing, which is fun.

Like some songs that I said I knew, I realized, because I told them I knew half the songs and which ones were which, I realized, like, I know them well enough to sing along to, but not necessarily to sing when I’m not listening to them.

So I have to really work on all the songs.

A great example is Only the Good Die Young by Billy Joel.

And I know a lot of the words, but I don’t know some.

So it’s like, you know, It comes down to faith.

I know more of the words than that, but you get the idea.

But Liam was kind enough to play piano on that one so I could just practice it without listening along to the original.

And boy, did he complain about how I sang the final verse.

He thought my rhythm was off on the final verse because of the way Billy does it.

And I’m like, well, I’m going to try to get better at that, but worst case, I’m going to do it my way.

It’s a cover.

It’s not an exact duplication.

It’s a cover.

Covers should be a little bit original, but people also, they know the song, they kind of want to hear it the way they know, so it’s the whole thing.

But anyway, I’m actively working on that.

And then I got to promote this gig, and it’s so weird to promote this gig.

It’s like, hey, come see me sing as a fill-in person in this band that I’m not in.

But anyway, it’s local.

So it’s literally local, and it’s at a place called Local.

So how bad can it be?

Meanwhile, Jagged Little Pill.

As we have discussed, dear listener, I do have a princess track, and that continues to mean that sometimes I waste some real time at rehearsal.

I was at a three-hour rehearsal on Monday or Tuesday where I was called for seven.

I was used starting at 745 for a discussion with one of the directors about the character, which is not useless.

That can be useful stuff, but it’s not rehearsing.

It’s, hey, you’re here, so let’s use you in some way.

And then I had to get plugged into the very end of a number, and they always dismiss me when they’re working on that number because, wait, you’re in just the end of it, so we don’t need you.

But he’s like, you know, we’ve always dismissed you.

Why don’t we stay and have you plug you in finally?

I’m like, great.

But they did not get to the end of the number.

So just at 10, rehearsal ends at 10 p.m.

Just at 10, they’re like, hey, why don’t we also do this thing with Lex on the side?

So they took the woman who plays my wife and me, and we went off to the side and just mapped out the end, which took two minutes.

So I kind of sat around from 830 until 10 to do two minutes.

And listen, I’m complaining to you, but I went into this show eyes wide open knowing that with this kind of a track in the show that I was going to have some downtime.

The dream scenario is they’re really heavily, beautifully, smartly optimized so that your downtime is minimized as much as possible.

And that’s been a challenge in this show.

They’ve had various things working against them on scheduling, tons of conflicts in this cast, which means that people aren’t always there all the time.

And our stage manager, who’s in charge of scheduling, had a death in the family, so she wasn’t available.

So it was like not quite as precise scheduling, let’s say, but it’s fine.

We’re getting to a place now where we’re going to start to just be running things.

And early days when you start running things, they call it stumbling.

So we did a stumble through of Act 2 yesterday.

We didn’t finish Act 2, of course.

But we’ll finish Act 2, and then we’ll just turn around and start Act 1.

And when it’s stumbling, the reason you don’t get through it is because you’re stopping to fix things or how are we going to do this scene change or let’s tweak this thing, but we’re getting there.

It’s not infrequent that you feel like you’re behind where you want to be.

I certainly feel like we’re behind where we want to be, but I have optimism.

We’ll get there.

Anyway, if you’re local, if you’re in the tri-state area, you should certainly come see me do this show.

It’s going to be fun, probably.

Anyway, I hope you’re having a wonderful Thursday, May 21st.

And if you haven’t installed GNOME for Mac or iOS, what is wrong with you?

Go get it.

Lexfreeman.com slash GNOME.

Goodbye.

Lex.