The Como Brothers – PRESHOW RITUALS

In this Preshow Rituals segment, Matt Como of the rock duo, The Como Brothers, shares what they do before every show. You can check out their rituals, after the break.

Matt Como: My brother Andrew and I have been playing a lot of shows. We’ve performed 80-100 shows each year for the past 4 years but this past year we actually were able to do even more – close to 120 shows. We want to work even harder – our aim is to do 313 shows in a year span pretty soon – just so we can say we did more than Ed Sheeran while he was busting his ass. I want to be the hardest working person I know in terms of going at music at every waking moment. Practicing our instruments, singing, shows. I believe every person on this earth is a product of the time they invest in themselves and that anyone can succeed at doing what they want to do if they truly focus on putting the work and time in. No matter what industry you are in: you are a product of the time you invest in your own talent. Whether it be painting, stock-brokering, teaching, photography, legislating, songwriting… anything! You can achieve anything you want if you put your mind to doing it and stop at nothing to succeed. Our parents taught us this. That’s our philosophy so to speak — so anyway with all these shows we’ve been doing, we have definitely developed pre-show rituals. The rituals are so ingrained in us that a lot of it is almost an afterthought and habit so it is fun to talk about the quirky things we do!

I’ll start by giving your readers an idea of where ‘The Como Brothers’ have been performing. We are based in Long Island, New York. This is a good location for us because there is easy access to New York City and other states in the North East are easy to get to — the cities are fairly close together. It’s not like in other areas of the country where it takes forever to drive from place to place. Our shows are mostly in the North East US including New York City, Long Island, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Pennslyvania, Massachusetts, and more. However, we’ve also performed in Virgina, Florida, Tennessee, California, and Maryland in 2016. In past years we visited South Carolina and Rhode Island as well.

The ritual that we do EVERY time without fail is at least 15 minutes of vocal warm-ups. We have voice notes from our vocal coach, Michael Douglas, that we plug into the AUX cable in the car and sing along to. It doesn’t matter who is in the car – friends, new people we just met, photographers, media people, fans… whoever is in the car with us will hear us singing the most ridiculous vocal warm-ups… and if you aren’t used to hearing vocal warm-ups it can be pretty hilarious and ‘awkward in a funny way’ for those people to hear us doing it in such an unashamed way.

Another ritual that we did for every show for a long time and still sometimes do it for inspiration is turning on a specific Dave Grohl interview and it basically confirms everything we believe in about music. There is a ‘music scene’ anywhere you go. Some people complain ‘oh there is no music scene in my area’. I say that is complete and absolute nonsense. I don’t believe in that BS and I think that kind of thinking is destructive and ultimately kills many music careers for people before it even starts. Just think — hypothetically — what if Paul McCartney at 22 years old walks into an open mic in your town and sings an original song he just made called “Yesterday”. Let’s say there are 25 people in that coffee shop. ALL 25 of those people would turn their head and say holy shit. That guy is so amazing. They would follow him and come to his next show. You just have to be that good. In Dave Grohl’s words, “you have to be badasss”. People will recognize it if you are. Anywhere there is a human being, there is a potential ‘fan’ AKA someone who digs the music you just played AKA, a music scene. And that should be encouragement for everyone – because you CAN be that good if you work at it. I am rambling on but I have many theories like this. We also watch The Beatles on Ed Sullivan for inspiration — we’re always like, ok let’s go up there and lay it all out there like John and Paul!

A personal ritual of mine is finding pizza before a show. Just one slice. I know it’s bad for singing but I love pizza so much. After shows, our most frequent ritual on weekends is going to AppleBee’s and getting half price appetizers. Amazing, amazing post-show food. After show rituals always include meeting every single person that wants to talk to us because we appreciate their interest in what we are doing very much.

I hope you enjoyed this talk about The Como Brothers rituals and these theories on life – I enjoyed thinking about it anyway. There are many other rituals but I’ll save some for next time – these highlight some of my favorite ones. I hope to see you at one of our shows soon. Check out our new song “Magic” which we are just releasing – lyric video is on YouTube – and let us know what you think!

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