This afternoon was my show, which I think sounded fine on the air, but was much more stressful than usual. It's always fast paced because the songs are all so short. And I was kind of tired & was doing everything more slowly than usual. I knew I was feeling out of it when I couldn't find a CD on the shelf and then realized I was looking for When Love Goes Wrong under H! What's that about?
Then late in the show I got a comment about the distinction between hot jazz & sweet bands, and I decided it would be good to play a hot and sweet version of the same song. Which I probably should have done during the sweet band show two weeks ago, but better late than never! Unfortunately I was dawdling about picking out the songs, then suddenly realized I had 20 seconds before the current song ended, nothing cued up and no idea what I was going to play next. Holy crap! I managed to get something into the CD player with only a brief moment dead air, I would guess less than a second. (Then again, a full second of dead air is a really long time. I'll have to listen to the archive and see how it sounds.) I don't know if anyone even noticed but it really threw me off. It's hard to recover from that kind of blind screaming panic. It stressed me out so much that I took a nap when I got home.
After dinner I started working on planning the two tribute shows I have scheduled for November: Hoagy Carmichael and Billy Strayhorn. They both have birthdays on Sundays, only a week apart, and Thanksgiving in between! So I need to have both shows completely planned out in advance. Tonight I got the songs pretty much picked out for the Carmichael show and got started on sequencing. I ordered one CD for each show and put a couple of movies in my netflix queue. (I use Audio Hijack Pro and Audacity to extract songs from movies, turn them into audio files, then burn them to CD. It's been really helpful for these theme shows when I sometimes want to play songs from movies that are hard to find on CD.)
The best news is that the library has good bios of both Carmichael and Strayhorn. If it's not too rainy I'll go check them out tomorrow. I also ordered a book about Strayhorn's music. Probably overkill, but Amazon Marketplace had a used copy for $5.50 including shipping which I just couldn't pass up. So I think I'm in pretty good shape, at least I've made a good start.
I didn't notice the dead air, for what it's worth.
Really? That's a relief. I downloaded the archive but haven't listened to it yet.