Sadly, these days, busking in the subways (or outdoors in the warmer months) is one of the few reliable ways left for musicians to make some money through their music. While busking with a group of fellow musicians can be fun, doing it by alone isn’t easy, and requires a lot of self discipline and self confidence; but it can be an excellent training ground: busking is like being on stage for a whole day, with a constantly changing (and therefore unbiased) audience; it’s an opportunity for a prolonged trial and error session that, over time, can potentially reveal many important secrets related to entertaining a crowd: "how does the average person react to each of my songs?" "What is the mood, or lyric, or body language that triggers a response?" "What gets the travelers to drop their cash in the hat?"
Today we saw Gabriel Mayers busking at our local subway station, and – even just for a minute or so – we enjoyed his understated folk songs. It turns out the guy embraces the NYC subway experience entirely, by recording in it, and allowing train and announcement noises to randomly enter his tracks. Check out his latest single "Sixty Charisma Scented Blackbirds" – and the NYC subway noises that come with it.
