I love this topic! Plenty of good tunes here in the replies, but thar be dragons there.
When people like us put together setlists, we gravitate towards guitar-based music. More guitar? We like it more!
But the crowd doesn’t like songs for the same reasons we do. They like what they like.
Bar owners don’t care what you sound like—they care if the crowd shows up, stays through your way-way-way-too-long set break, and spends a ton of money on booze. Make the bar owner happy? You get more (and better) gigs.
All else being equal, it’s also a lot more fun to play for enthusiastic crowds.
Know whose job depends on keeping the dance floor packed? Wedding bands. And luckily, every wedding band on earth keeps a full setlist of songs they know on their website. Go crib a few successful bands’ setlists. See what songs pop up again and again.
That doesn’t mean you have to play stuff you don’t like. Think of the Venn Diagram overlap between “songs I like” and “songs drunk people like” and learn those songs.
- I love singer-songwriter deep cuts. People in bars don’t. So I don’t play those songs (in bars anyway).
- People in bars love Luke Bryan, but I think he’s terrible. So no matter how many requests I get, I ain’t learning Luke Bryan.
- Drunk people love The Killers, Bruce Springsteen, and Whitney Houston. So do I! So Whitney, Bruce, and the Killers are all in heavy rotation.
Treat it like a hypothesis—“I think people will lose their minds over this song.” But if you play it at three gigs and no one cares about it, take it off the list. Try something else. Keep refining until there’s no fat in your sets. You’ll know you’ve got it when people forget to go home.
Personally I try to steer clear of up-to-the-minute hits. Sure, for two weeks last summer everyone wanted to hear Old Town Road, but now we’re largely over it. It’ll be a great tune to cover in three years, once we’ve all had a chance to get nostalgic about that moment in time.
It’s one of the hidden-in-plain-sight things about playing covers: you’re using other people’s memories as a lever. Your version of Life Is A Highway or Boys Of Summer might be totally mediocre, but it’s a skeleton key that opens up everyone’s fond remembrances of driving with the windows down and the radio up.
Something that’s worked really well for me is “song menus”—we hand trifold brochures with a list of songs we know and invite people to text our “request hotline.”
I’m linking to a Dropbox folder here with our song menu. You can see the list of tunes that are still on our menu after four years of playing the same bar every week. I’ve also included editable templates (for both Word & Pages) if you want to try them out for yourself.
