Jay DeMarcus Quotes

Set lists are tough because you come up with this structure of how the songs are going to go from one to the next, but at the same time, you have to be spontaneous and take requests and change the set list at the drop of a hat.

So I usually call the songs when I get on the stage, according to what the crowd feels like to me. I can jump from 50 years ago to right up to now, and people will be familiar with the songs. And since we never do them the same way, it's a new experience.

I only like doing live telly. It's great because you go in and do it and then go home. No edit, no retakes.

And so I've always been fascinated by the technical end of theater, and a lot of my closest friends are not actors, but in the other end of the business.

I love improvising on the spot. I like that pressure.

I'll have the music, and then I'll just turn the microphone on, press Play and Record and sing. And whatever comes out ends up being the melody.

The interesting thing about improvisation is you're making something up in front of the audience. Now music helps you out a little bit because you have an instrument that'll separate you from the audience.

There are a lot of people using technology that are playing to a click with backing vocals already stuck in there on some computerized thing that runs along in time to the show so they have these amazing vocals that are only partly the guys on stage producing them at the time.

This is why improvisational music and comedy is so inspiring: You are seeing something being born, and that energy, there is no substitute for. These songs, most of them, are about a minute old when you hear them.

I always give the encore over to chaos, so people can yell out requests and I can hack my way through a song that I don't really know anymore.

When I'm performing music, it's like I'm doing a big improv.

There are things you do that just come natural, and sometimes those are amazingly in synch, and sometimes they're horribly out of synch, and you're like, 'Ooo! That wasn't very good tonight.' Most of the time, it's just on.

We do pretty much the same set list every night, and the show's down to certain cues because we have video and all this production and lights and everything going on.

When we were recording, sometimes I wondered if what we were doing would even be possible to play live.

It's so easy to make albums with overdubbing and editing these days, but I really prefer playing live and just getting the music to sound right because the musicians, the songs and the performances are good.

What I love about improv so much is that we are all discovering it at roughly the same time. The performers are maybe, what, a half second ahead of the audience? There's very little lag time. I think of a thing, I say it, then the audience is laughing and it all happened in a second.

At Second City and improvising at iO, you're creating a character in an instant. All of a sudden, you're creating this history and this past for your character, and you're discovering it while you're doing it, and that's part of the fun of it.

My records are one thing. My live performances are something totally different because they're very improvised performances.

Some nights you just can't predict what's going to happen live for an hour.

I think of the Tycho sound as something separate from the band. I think the methodology and approach to production I use on the Tycho records can be applied to a lot of things. But from a performance and songwriting perspective, yes, Tycho is a live band.

In the past, we never really had that kind of spontaneity on record. When you start touring, you play songs in a certain way and then I start to feel like it's tough to really get lost in my playing.

I like to improvise so much live because I get bored playing the same thing over again. It's like the kid at school that already knows all the answers so doodles all over the paper. I do that a lot live.

The main thing with my shows is that I'm professional but not highly polished. I don't like people to think they're just seeing an album in person.

Freestyling helps me portray the emotion that I'm feeling right there instead of writing it at home and having to add to it.

When we perform music at TV shows, we always try to do something that's not scripted because anything that's a surprise for the audience and the crew and the other performers, it works better on camera and for the people back home, too.