9 pm, $5, 21+

Sometimes people ask me why I insist on performing all components of my songs live. “It would be a lot easier to use pre-recorded drum patterns,” they’ll say, or, “Why don’t you just sequence everything and play over top of the backing tracks?”

The short answer is, that would be cheating. The long answer goes something like this:

Going to see a show should be about what happens that day, in that room, between that audience and that performer. It shouldn’t be a carbon copy of the same performance from the night before. How I slept, what I ate, the conversations I had, the articles I read: all of those things affect my brain chemistry and how I’m going to interact with the songs that day. Making art is an opportunity to synthesize and reinterpret our unique lived experiences and reintroduce them to the world as shared dreams of sound and light. If I used canned backing tracks I’d be robbing myself of that opportunity.

I want the freedom to make mistakes. Mistakes are far more human and interesting than mechanized accuracy. Be suspicious of anyone who wants to scrub art of its imperfections. As soon as art becomes perfect, it dies.