One Idea Per Band

Pick a sound, a genre, an angle, a color scheme, and a concise set of topics to sing about for your band. Do not be eclectic. Nobody will understand what you are doing if you have a heavy metal song, a country song, an alt-country song, a disco song AND a wallahalli song in your repertoire. Nobody will be impressed. Everyone who sees and hears your band will think, "These guys are unfocused and lame." If you want to do all those different styles of music, create separate bands for each of them. Focus. Specialize. Be Excellent.

Stay Grounded

If you perform often enough (more than once in a public space containing more than seven people), someone besides your mother WILL compliment your music. It is inevitable, especially if you perform in venues which serve alcohol. Do not believe them. Compliments are evil. The more you believe them, the less talented you will become. Compliments are like anti-matter to talent-matter. If you have any talent to begin with, be extremely skeptical of praise and compliments. If you have no talent, you may bask in all the praise you receive with no fear of adverse effects. If you have no talent and you continue to foist your ego on others, said complementing others deserve all they get from you in return (such as a new song about how awesome it is when fans tell me how awesome I am, called My Fans Are Awesome).

You might be thinking at this point in the process of receiving Banjo's unsolicited advice, "How do I know if I have talent?" This is easily answered. If you ask yourself this question, the answer is, "Yes, you have talent." If you do not ask yourself this question, then you have no talent. One important symptom of possessing talent is wondering whether you, in fact, possess it. Many believe that talent is difficult to pinpoint or identify. This is false. Talent is easily identified by this simple test of Banjo's. Let me repeat:

SIMPLE TALENT TEST:

If you regularly ask youself, "Do I have talent?" then you ARE talented. Congratulations!

If you have no doubts about your great talent, you are a hopeless hack. Please stop asking me to friend your band on MySpace.

In a similar vein, if you regularly ask yourself, "Am I crazy?" then you are sane and grounded. Crazy people rarely know they are crazy. (Stop right there--you know some people who say, "I am CRAZY!" and they ARE crazy. CRAZY crazy. On medicine. With a named condition. With a CV of Crazy Bona Fides. (Do we really need examples? Going barefoot for a year. Eating from a dog bowl because it's convenient and easy to clean.) You might be such a Crazy person. If so, you are Sanely Crazy. How can you be truly, unmitigatably crazy when you are actively working to mitigate the negative effects of your craziness? That's called Sanity, my friend.) For emphasis:

SIMPLE SANITY TEST:

If you regularly ask yourself, "Am I crazy?" then you are sane. Beats the alternative--really!

If you never wonder about your sanity, you are insane. Please promise Banjo you will never be a landlord.

Great Gear Does Not a Great Artist Make

Don't let anyone ever tell you that your cherry red Ibanez strat knockoff isn't good enough. You don't need an original hollow-body lovingly carved by Les Paul Himself from the heart of the rosewood tree in his Grammy's backyard to be a great artist. You need talent. (Do you have talent? See above.) If you cannot enthall the entire lunchtime cafeteria crowd at the temp job you took three weeks ago and just might have for the next seven years with a plastic fork, a chocolate milk carton and your own moxie and charisma, then it doesn't matter how awesome your gear is--you cannot buy your way to greatness.

This is especially important when looking for new members of your band in (too often, recurring) instances where you need to replace a member with whom you have irreconciable artistic differences (such as: you continually ask yourself, "Do I have talent, and also, am I crazy?" while he only ever asks himself, "What kind of burrito will I have for my din-din?"). Beware of anyone who offers excellent gear as a sort of dowry for joining your band. PA, microphones, a recording system, groupies, all stuff you already have but maybe don't have state-of-the-art like this dude/ette. Let him/her go. If s/he is, say--totally random guess here--a drummer, and s/he brings seven (7) or more cymbals with him/her, let him/her go. Which brings me to:

Banjo’s Best™ Advice: When auditioning drummers, tell them to leave the kit at home, then provide them with a five-gallon bucket, a pie pan and chopsticks.

When you find a drummer who TOTALLY ROCKS with such crude instruments, you will know you have found someone who has talent, someone who can turn your own soulful creations into Works of Capital-A Art. Someone to stick with even when he tries to convince you to play one of his tunes. And you don't mind if he sings it, do you? And maybe that tune you sing about your last girlfriend's crooked smile would be better with a different bridge. While we're at it, a different chorus, too. And you don't mind if he sings that one, too, do you? 

Finally, stay creative, keep writing songs, keeping working with the others in your band to make them better, keep performing, keep asking your friends to come see you even when they have told you, "Absolutely do not ever ask me to come see your lame A-hole band ever again, and I mean Ever EVEEERRRR." Playing in a band teaches you important skills that will serve you throughout life, such as patience, persitance, and learning to suffer humiliation without letting it damage your core sense of self. In the immortal words of someone, "Everyone should play in a band at least once in life."