YEAR IN REVIEW: Songwriters Open Mic Ann Arbor
Beginning our 30th year of open-mic-music-making, in January 2025 … Songwriters Open Mic started in the Winter of 1996 at a small performing space inside Oz’s Music Store. In the early months of the Covid pandemic, feeling the need for community, we went online. We quickly evolved a weekly format, using Zoom: the first Tuesday nights of the month for original songs only, and the other Tuesdays became Anything Goes, for originals or cover songs.
Zoom (and the MeetUp app) presented the opportunity to invite songwriters from way beyond Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti. In 225 Zoom sessions, and counting, we’ve managed to “TURN ON ORIGINAL SOUND FOR MUSICIANS” in a very satisfying way, hosting entertainers from approximately half the states plus Canada, Mexico, Australia, England, Scotland and India. And we use the feature in Zoom that provides a video of the evening, and send it to performers to download and review.
It sounds like a lot, but on any given Tuesday night, we expect just 10 or 12 performers. There’s time for each of us to play a set of two or three songs. And typically there’s also time for informal talk about your songs and how you came to write them, or to offer or receive songwriting support, pursue a rabbit hole of music history, an idiosyncratic tangent, giddy enthusiasm, guilty pleasure, or oddball perspective.
Thirty years on, and all those “original sounds” are still fun.
You’re invited to perform or listen. Get the Zoom link, which changes each week, from jimnovakmusic(at)gmail(dot)com
Re: the map: In 2024, SOM hosted songwriters from 15 states (and 4 countries).