Blues musician Poppa Dawg is coming to Penticton to perform at his favourite venue in the Okanagan āĀ the Dream CafĆ©.
āIāve been there as a musician and in the audience ā and the interaction is so immediate,ā he said āItās not like a big giant bar where you canāt see the people in the back; youāre right there. You can have a personal conversation with like, 100 people.ā
Such rich conversations rarely occur at other venues, he said.
āDream CafĆ© is a pretty special place. My favourite thing about it, not a TV set to be found. You want to watch TV? Go home. Want to play keno? Go to the casino. I hate that stuff in bars. But this place āĀ itās all about the music.ā
Nonetheless, he said all live performances offer invaluable feedback.
āThey either clap, boo or tell you to go home, so you get that instant satisfaction. Itās really hard to translate that to recording. A live performance is something you share with the audience.ā
Poppa Dawgās songwriting, he said, often makes tongue-in-cheek observations about the mundane.
āI like writing songs about people I know,ā he said. āMy song Nobody Here Feels Sorry for You is about somebody who was whining and bitching about their first-world life. āYou complain an awful lot,Ā like every day.ā And I thought hmm, thisāll be a good song.ā
Blues music has proven itself as the only avenue for Poppa Dawg to share his work, though it wasnāt until he was in his mid 20s before he could fully appreciate the genre.
āI was playing all kinds of music on the road; new age punk, classic rock.ā
He said after a few years playing for a band called The Psychedelics, which put heavier emphasis on the visual aspect of his performance, it was time to shift his focus.
āI got tired of it. It wasnāt doing anything for me and the blues did.ā
He especially became interested in the rich histories which are intertwined into blues music.
āItās real stories. I donāt care if I donāt make any money doing blues, this is the only music that speaks to me. Thereās something earthy about it, something real about it.ā
In telling a story of his own, Poppa Dawg wrote a song about JW-Jones, a successful Canadian blues musician, whoās often referred to as āDubā as a shortened version of JW. At the time he was unaware of the emerging electronic genre of music and titled the song Dub Step.
It wasnāt until after he recorded Dub Step that somebody told him about the style of music with the same name.
After orally imitating the sounds of electronic music, he said heĀ never had a clue that it existed, and then joked about a collaboration with Skrillex.
His show begins at 8 p.m. on Oct. 2. Tickets cost $12 and can be purchased by calling 250-490-9012.
āOf the thousands of talented people out there playing blues, rock, funk soul jazz, I just want to encourage people to please go out, pay the cover charge and support any type of live music.ā
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