Route 47 has become like a “home of the north metro” for Sugar Buzz. Beth and Paul are frequenters of their weekly open mic series and have befriended many open mic attendees for years now. So, when we saw the social media “going” numbers, we knew it would be a big show.
What we didn’t expect was the organic growth in followers and first-timers showing up. It seemed like every other person was either a first timer invited by a fan, or a someone who heard from someone else “you have to go see these guys”. That’s gratifying.
The stage is more than big enough for the circus act of movement we bring. We also had some new elements up our sleeve: Paul was donning a “Keytar” to replace one of Mark’s seldom-used keyboards. This created more space for the band, and added an element of excitement to the stage show. Paul could move around and re-created the voices for “Get Lucky” electronically as well as now could jump onto the ego box for a solo.
We added a new-to-us song “Gimme Shelter” which featured drummer Brendan on lead vocals and singer Beth on the iconic “…it’s just a shot away”. In adding new songs, we try to ensure it fits our variety mold, but also showcases talents onstage and isn’t currently too overplayed. But, a new song is always a risk. We added Lizzo not too long ago and Whitesnake. How would this fare? The crowd loved it. Younger folks are at least familiar with the chorus and the older ones loved the way-back selection.
As a Minnesota cover band, we are ever-evolving. We aim to keep changing things up to improve ourselves, to keep it fresh for the audience and ourselves. It’s often easy to sit back and rely on “what we’ve always done” – but we also know that what we’ve done has gotten us to where we are now… but we need to do more to get to where we are going.