I Don’t Want to Be a Jukebox Musician.

To start off, this is not a dig at tribute/cover bands or musicians who sing a lot of cover songs. Personally I think covering another artist’s song is alright. It’s a great way to showcase your talent and play a song in your own kind of style.

But for myself as someone who writes a lot of their own material I’ve started intentionally doing less and less covers of other peoples music. Being a local musician and playing lots of smaller venue/bar shows, I get a lot of song requests and my response is usually the same. “Sorry, I don’t know that song.” or “Sorry, I don’t do requests.” And after I say this they usually walk away disappointed or keep asking if I know any song by a particular artist, it bums me out to fell like i’ve let someone down and on very rare occasions make them angry because I either don’t know a song or just refuse to play it.

To sum it up song covers are cool and can be fun but not at the expense of the artist and originality. I’ll keep striving and pushing my own songs and making it the “Aaron Carney Show”