I’m right in the middle of listening to submissions for the Peterborough Folk Festival, and as usual, I’ve got a brain that’s buzzing with thoughts that might not have anything to do with what bands are going to make it onstage this year.
I have no idea if I’m particularly like, or particularly different from other Artistic Directors and bookers. I know I have really strong opinions about what I like and what I don’t, which I think is pretty common. You’ve got be certain about something if you’re going to take the kind of pressure and scrutiny that you get when you’re choosing the acts – it’s one of those things that everyone thinks they can do, and could do better than you if given the opportunity. Some of them may be right, but most people have no idea what kind of stuff you have governing your decision (which includes your market, the obligations to funders, and what you’re trying to shape as the overall character of an event as well as who’s good and what you like). And even fewer people have any idea what it’s like dealing with the sheer volume of submissions.
553 submissions this year through Sonicbids alone!
The PFF is a small, free Ontario folk festival. We have a large audience – about 8000 people over the course of the weekend – but because we’re free, and rely entirely on funding and volunteers, we have a small budget (probably one of the smallest budgets for an Ontario festival, though it’s improved significantly in the last couple of years). I have about 20-30 slots available for performers, and this year it looks like I’ve gotten about 800 submissions from across Canada and around the world, not counting the less official channels of friends sending me links to their favourite bands, agents sending me email about their recent avails, and stuff I’ve seen and heard around. That’s fewer than last year, because I cut out one of the normal channels by which I was getting CDs – it seemed like the OCFF drop-boxes were mostly getting me the same artists every year. I’ve also been a hardass about the deadline this year; no late submissions, even if you are local.
The three official channels to submit to the PFF are through the OCFF’s ‘Flash Your Folk’ program, Sonicbids’ EPKs, and good old snail mail. I’m trying to listen to everything pretty much in the same timeframe, to try and judge them reasonably against one another.
Last year I found this process arduous and frustrating; I wrote many, many humourous rants about things that musicians do that drive me crazy. I don’t know if I’ve just gotten more zen about it this year, or if the submissions are better (not one serious Jewel-wannabe yet!), but the process isn’t so bad this time ’round. It’s less amusing for my friends, however.
Usually I listen to about 30-120 seconds of any given track; I try to listen to a couple of tracks, but I often know right away if it’s going in the ‘No’ pile. The other pile isn’t a ‘Yes’ – it’s a ‘Maybe,’ dependent on whomever else I’m considering, unless the artist in question blows my mind. Only a few artists have ever really excited me – Old Man Luedecke springs to mind as the one who really caught my attention instantly, and who I ran around forcing people to listen to until I’d converted a bunch of people into his fans. But typically, I’m pretty ambivalent about recorded music as compared to live music, and at best I will kind-of like your tracks and think it might mean you sound good live.
An afternoon of listening.
While I’m listening to tracks, I’m most likely to look at where you’re from (some of my funding is dependent on hiring Canadian artists from outside Ontario) and your photos (better than a bio to give me an idea of what I’m getting onstage). I read snippets of your bio, but honestly, my head starts to swim after the 400th ’started playing piano at age 4′ or ‘met in university,’ and then I have to take a break to write mean and humourous things about musicians’ bios.
I have a personal weakness for banjo and fiddles, hip-hop and pop, and Bhangra which makes me a bit weird in a music community that’s absolutely dominated by guitars. I like booking people who haven’t played Peterborough much, or who don’t have a very wide audience yet, but are brilliant. I shy away from a lot of the festival-staple acts, and while sometimes that’s perceived as a snub, it’s not really meant as one.
I’m sick to death of the 14-member bands out there, in part because I feel like it’s a losing proposition – I know how much touring costs, and how much you’re typically getting paid, and it’s too depressing. The other side of that coin is that with so many people, usually there are at least a handful who are filler, and the whole band rarely rehearses together, so the final sound is bloated and unreliable (you can argue, but the live performance is always going to tell the truth).
I don’t like really middle-of-the-road sounds, so if your music is too easily categorizable and sounds too much like things a lot of other people are doing, I’m unlikely to book it. If the tracks are obviously over-produced – you brought in an orchestra and a bunch of session musicians, and it all sounds very obviously nothing like you’re going to sound on the road, I’m unlikely to book you. If you’re trying really hard to sound like your favourite musician (seriously, stop trying to sound like Tom Waits), I won’t book you.
The PFF 2008 bulletin board with the complete lineup.
I’m looking for sweetness, and brave differences, and real skill, and the ability to stop a person in their tracks at a festival, and make them sit down and listen. Or get up and dance and listen. To transform a casual listener into part of a community, into an engaged participant. Lots of really, really good bands can’t do that, no matter how many fans they have or how much money’s behind them.
There’s no equation; when you have 800 artists and bands competing for 20 or so slots, it’s instinct and love and long years doing this exact thing, over and over, that determine whom I’m going to book. And a lineup I work hard to craft for PFF would never work for another festival – different character, different venue, different audience. I can’t even begin to fathom how some festivals book by committee; how you can imagine you’ll get any sort of coherent artistic direction from a group of people is beyond me. I spend enough time arguing with myself, shuffling my lineup on the big bulletin board, and agonizing; and that’s what I’m going to be immersed in for the next month or so.
rain in the morning, and I think we had half our usual attendance (I also didn’t realize, I think, how many people come from out of town to PFF) due to the forecast sounding dire and miserable. But it turned out to be a beautiful day, with people saying ‘best PFF ever.’ And the workshops at 
