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Personally, I think that entertaining is about the audience, and it’s like dancing with somebody. You don’t want to dance with somebody and then not pay attention to dancing with them; otherwise, you should dance by yourself. And you should sing for yourself in your bedroom and never step on stage. I don’t think you should leave the audience behind, so what I do is I never write a set list. I think when you write a set list, you just set yourself up for losing the audience because every audience every night has a different mood. It’s like horse riding. Every single horse has a different personality and so you’ve got to adapt to that personality. And some nights, people come in and they’re really tired and they just got off work and they really don’t want to be challenged; they just want to relax a little bit, and so you ease into a set differently. You loosen them up before you start hitting them with harder material. And the pacing of the show is really everything and that, to me, is where it’s really exciting because, if you work a crowd right, you start with – say you’re doing a theater and there’s 2,000 people. You start with 2,000 separate people and they’re strangers sitting next to strangers this far from each other. They feel a little bit awkward. They’re bringing their day in with them, they just got in a fight, they just made love, they just got off work – 2,000 different things that each of these people did – and it starts the show and if you work them and massage them, you’ll feel a click in the audience and, all of a sudden, it’s one person. Now you have one energy, one energy that you’re working with. Now everybody’s in tune and everybody’s trained on you and then you can do whatever you want with them. You know? You can take them into really sensitive material and make people cry, and then you can feel people get uncomfortable, a little emotional maybe or a little bit tense, and then you back off and you do some lighter material or you tell some stories and juxtapose different moods. To me, that’s the best feeling in the world when you do your job right on stage and you really take a crowd on a journey with you or you ask them to cry and you end up in a whole ‘nother place and you feel transported by the end of show. It feels great. It’s the most fantastic feeling that I know. And I think the only way you really get that is by taking risks.
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