when the large band becomes less large

i'm sure you've always wondered why there are eight of us in ang bandang shirley, and some of you may have come across the explanation that we'd like to play at gigs even with one or two less band members present and be able to maintain our sound. throughout our stint together, we've had various experiences with shirley permutations. some of them worked, some of them were enough for a certain gig's purposes, and quite a few of them were failed experiments in bravado that just ended in us retreating to our band corner in shame. these attempts have been necessary since our members' lifestyles are so varied, and thus we have different resources to draw from for shirley commitment: jing, kathy and zig have respectable office day jobs, heidi owns her own company, ean and owel are/were/etc.(?) in school, joe is "on sabbatical", and i'm leveraging my personal talents to scrape away a living as an editing whore. eventually, there's going to be a scheduling disaster somewhere along the way.

so we've been trying to figure out ways to make do. there were times when kathy and i would talk of never again accepting an owel-less gig because the boy-girl harmonies have become such an important element in the shirley sound. i believe, though, that we're finally getting into a stripped-down groove when it comes to playing with less members. owel can always sing without me because he wrote the first few songs with just his own voice in mind, and those Rizal Day Session versions were quite lovely, too. joe and ean are starting to own the "boy" parts when they're absolutely necessary, and hey, OH YEAH, we have ean and jing songs, too, that we can play live to serve as a rare treat for our lucky audience. haha.

shirley stripped has never been more severely tested than at our last two gigs. we were supposed to play at terno inferno with an already-pared-down lineup of me, ean, joe, zig and jing because owel and heidi had family matters to attend to. imagine our panic when jing called us up to say he had to cancel because of an emergency. but for some reason, the other boys said, "let's go," so we pushed through with the set with just zig on drums, ean on bass, joe on guitar and me on vox. it was very unnerving because we hadn't practiced some of the songs, but saguijo's patrons were kind to us, and some even bought our albums, which terno was selling outside, after our set. YAY. kathy was so proud of our professionalism, and i think we all felt elated by the fact that we pulled it off and had fun in the process.

also, for the very first time in history, that night's entire shirley entourage fit into zig's tiny little sedan on our way home. INTENSE!!!

the most recent shirley stripped set was held at last night's happy mondays event at mag:net katipunan. jing was part of the poetry reading segment of the program, performing a bass solo to his poem and future-shirley-song "pulso". after that, we set up onstage with just owel, me, ean on guitar and jing on bass. heidi and kathy were there that night, too, but only for moral support (which we greatly appreciated, of course). because we hadn't been able to practice our songs with that setup, we had to do on-the-spot rearrangements that resulted in fun, distorted, quirky versions that made us laugh onstage. however, mag:net denizens seemed impressed with and appreciative of our earnestness, so the set was a success.

anyway... ang galing ng mga kabanda ko! hahaha. i LOVE them. that's not to say that we can always play with less members, nor that we've got the stripped setup down pat already. many factors come into play when we accept or decline gigs. but i promise that the desire to play is always there, and i'm just happy that at least for some gigs, becoming a less-large band isn't that much of a hindrance anymore.

- selena