San Diego\u2019s rep as both a tourist destination and a military town, has a nice side effect for area musicians, in offering a lot of opportunities for cover bands. While our original music community generates the most buzz, there are many excellent performers specializing in cover tunes as well, such as Rosy Dawn, who appears with her band at Humphrey\u2019s Backstage Live on Sept. 6.
\nDawn is a rare San Diego native, born in Encinitas, near Moonlight Beach, and growing up mostly in Carlsbad, before settling in Clairemont. While she has written original music, for the moment Dawn is happy to concentrate on cover songs for her gigs. “Most of the venues where we play, the crowd is there to dance to songs they know,” she explained. “Even if you play a somewhat popular tune by Stevie Wonder or Bruno Mars, you won\u2019t get the same reaction that you do from their biggest hits.” Certain songs always elicit a crowd response. “As soon as people hear the bass line to Michael Jackson\u2019s “Billie Jean,” or the intro to Al Green\u2019s “Let\u2019s Stay Together,” they are on the dance floor!” she said. “But I think when it comes to me singing and getting the crowd\u2019s attention vocally, songs like The Doobie Brother\u2019s “Long Train Running” or “Rock Steady” by Aretha Franklin seem to get a reaction.” She\u2019s happy to play the crowd pleasers. “Before my husband and I were married and had our son, we lived in Denmark for a summer, playing in the pubs as a duo,” she recalled. “We were young and had just graduated with our music degrees, so it was hard at first, for us to understand why people only wanted to hear the really popular songs.” In her mind all those tunes were overplayed. “But I realized it\u2019s because people want to be part of the music, they want to hear what they know. That\u2019s not such a bad thing.” She now considers that if there is a song that everyone knows the words to and can result in a shared moment with a group of strangers, “that\u2019s pretty cool!” she enthused. “Needless to say, during that time in Denmark, I got really tired of people asking to hear \u2018Hotel California\u2019 every night! But I recently had a gig over the 4th of July holiday and had a chance to sing that song. I hadn\u2019t in years, but it was a lot of fun and of course everyone was singing along.” Selwitz notes the music business can be tough, but she feels the rewards are worth it. “It\u2019s true, being a musician can have you feeling like you\u2019re on top of the world in one moment and in the next moment you feel like the smallest most insignificant thing. It\u2019s torture on your ego! I sometimes wonder why I do it, but I think any musician will agree that it\u2019s something we can\u2019t live without. Being able to express yourself musically on a regular basis is magical.”
\nUpcoming plans for Dawn include recording new originals for a possible album, but in the meantime she\u2019s pleased with her life in music. “I know it\u2019s corny and cliche, but it\u2019s so true that if you can make someone else feel something through your performance or if a song that you wrote speaks to someone, there really is no better feeling,” she said. “Aside from that, it\u2019s really great to be part of such a large community of fantastic musicians in the San Diego music scene. And really, I feel like I only know a large handful of folks, but can\u2019t wait to meet and play with many more,” she remarked. Rosy Dawn: Thursday, Sept. 6 at Humphrey\u2019s Backstage Live, 2241 Shelter Island Drive. 7 p.m. $5. humphreysbackstagelive.com.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
San Diego\u2019s rep as both a tourist destination and a military town, has a nice side effect for area musicians, in offering a lot of opportunities for cover bands. While our original music community generates the most buzz, there are many excellent performers specializing in cover tunes as well, such as Rosy Dawn, who appears […]<\/p>","protected":false},"author":726,"featured_media":274586,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"Rosy Dawn sings the hits at Humphrey\u2019s Backstage Live","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"jnews_override_counter":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[11549,11551,11600],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-274585","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-arts-entertainment","category-news","category-sdnews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/274585","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/726"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=274585"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/274585\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/274586"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=274585"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=274585"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=274585"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}