Twenty Minute Acoustic Set in Heaven

by Alex

In order to prove/test the comments are working on this blog again, I’d like you all ask you all about your 20 minute gig in heaven. As is well known, when people die they go up to Heaven. In heaven, of course, everyone can play guitar and sing just like how you always wanted to sound. When you first check in the angles give you a small ticket good for one 20 minute acoustic set (don’t loose it or you’ll have to go to the ‘lost stuff you never found’ box in your locker and dig around ’til you find it). You can cash this in in a small, intimate coffee house that looks just like Your Favorite Intimate Space, but even better because it is in heaven. It’s cold outside, but it’s warm in there — or else it’s balmy and open to the evening breezes coming off the ocean. The drinks are well mixed, or maybe everyone is just sipping tea. You can invite about fifty of your relatives and best friends, as well as anyone else who you’ve ever wanted to sing a song to. Angels arrange to have the souls of the audience attend while their owners are asleep or daydreaming, and they mostly remember the event as a pleasent if vague dream that makes them feel their loved ones have moved on and are happy in their new place. Since celebrities are frequent invitees, they tend to have suspiciously large numbers of dreams in which they’re featured as an honored guest — something that occasionally goes to their head. This explains why some celebrities are asshole egoists, and why Ewan MacGregor keeps having dreams of various bespectacled indy girls singing Ani Difranco’s “Both Hands” _just to him goddamit it_.

Once your audience is in place you have just around 20 minutes to do a short acoustic set with just your guitar — anything over 25 minutes is impossible to convincingly scrub off a soul’s databanks and the audience members have to spend the rest of their life with semi-real memories of heaven which are Strictly Against Regulation. All the love songs you wanted to sing to people, all the songs of despair you sang to yourself when you so desperately wanted to share with others, that wicked uber-tempo Ska-Punk cover of Free Bird you always wanted to do. All the singing and emotion and opening up you never got to do in life can all get rolled into one brief moment with your greatest enemies and wildest loves. I mean — it’s _heaven_ after all.

So the question: what do you play? In what order? Don’t be afraid to go a capella if you need to, although be warned: the angel bouncers at the door are super sick of a capella covers of Amazing Grace. In fact, try to pick songs which are uniquely your own, and try to vary the tempo a bit, so it’s not too monotonous. Give it some thought and let me know in the comments.

My list at the moment goes something like this:
“Bessie” by Jane Sibbery (whimsical, flying bovines to start)
“The Man They Call Jayne” from Firefly (the ‘Jaynestown’ episode) (the upbeat grassroots protest song)
“Sunrise” by Basil Greg (laid back post-reggae PNG song about dancing ’til dawn in Port Moresby)
“Both Hands” by Ani Difranco (hells yes I find this song overwhelmingly powerful)
“Alleluia (Here I Am)” by Edie Reader and the Fair Ground Attractions (the tear-jerker)
“Van Dieman’s Land” the U2 cover (the whistful fairwell benediction)