BMI Songwriters Showcase

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On our last night in Austin (Monday) we went to the BMI Songwriters Showcase at the Saxon Pub. BMI is, of course, the publishing and music rights management company for song writers. They will have offices in places like Music Row (Nashville), Tin Pan Alley (New York) and LA where there's a music scene. They set up an office here in Austin sometime around 2020 (after we were last here) and have hosted a monthly series, the first Monday of the month, from 6:00-7:30pm. It's a free show sponsored by BMI, there are no tickets required and they don't pass a tip jar. We arrive early and get good seats to enjoy the show. There are similar BMI Showcases in other cities. We are excited to see this showcase; it's not surprising that we've not been before as they started up during the pandemic. We would have missed the February event, damn!

BMI is hosting six singer songwriters tonight in two sets of three. Over the four years of this series they will have showcased several hundred songwriters. There is that much talent in Texas! Tonight each gets to perform two or three of their songs and while there is some chatting/introductions between songs they clip along pretty quickly in the one hour and a half allocated for the showcase. Each of the artists is signed to BMI and all of them have music published for which they receive royalty cheques; most also have records of their own.

The show runs as a song swap, or music in the round, with Owen Temple, Tina Wilkins, and her husband Walt Wilkins up first followed by Bri Bagwell, Mike McClure and Courtney Patton. Mike McClure had his partner Chrislyn Lawrence come up to sing a duet with him. We were impressed by all of them; this is the kind of music we look for. Songs that tell stories, some country, some maudlin but all excellent. No bass and drums, just a guitar to complement the song. When we return to Austin we need to mark first Monday's as something well worth attending. 

Unfortunately my portable sound recorder was packed away, we are leaving for home the next morning, so I didn't captured the music of that night ... much to my regret. Kate took a couple of short videos which are in the photo album. They give you a good sense of the quality of the music. It was all excellent. DanViewtube wasn't there. It would have been a great show for him to record but perhaps BMI is exercising their publishing rights. 

All too soon the show was over. The BMI hosts and the musicians did their bows and thanked the audience for attending. We thanked some of the musicians for the great show and talked briefly with Walt Wilkins on the way out. We compared restaurants and eateries around town. He recommended the "Shoal Creek Saloon" (where we've been many times) and "Fonda San Miguel" as the best in town; oddly we had just been reading about that one. I guess next time we're here we'll give it a go. It's within our stompin' grounds — just off of Burnet near Sue Patrick and the Little Longhorn Saloon.

There are other regular Monday night events in town, notably Bob Schneider's "Lonelyland" follows this show at 8:00 and then there's Monday Night Superclub, over at the El Mercado, which has Gabe Rhodes as a guest tonight. "Happyland" with Kimmie, Gabe and Louis Rhodes has been a regular Monday event and we've been to a couple already. We bump into our newly acquired friend, newly sober and a Saxon regular, "John", who tells us he was torn between this event and the Superclub but this is such a special event he had to be here. At the end of the show he tells us his friends at the Superclub have been texting him that it's a really great show there as well and he's dashing away to catch the last of it. 

We also make friends with another fellow in the audience, J.D. Graham, who is touring the area. He's a singer/songwriter as well and had done a gig with Courtney at the Redbird in New Braunfels (a listening we had not heard of but need to investigate). We're following him on Facebook, he's interesting too.

On this trip we've become Saxon Pub regulars. We've seen a lot of really great shows here with very few disappointments (there was an impossible Ameripolitan event with no seating). Tonight was one of the best.