Dance, Monkey, Dance

Doug Dicharry is still figuring out this whole one-man-band thing. In transitioning from a internationally touring band to a solo outfit -- Dance, Monkey, Dance -- he's still exploring how to reach people through his writing and his music.

"There's a lot of different reasons people create music, and one of the reasons I like to perform is [to] maybe provide [people] with the situation to feel something and, hopefully, make them want to move or smile or cry," Dicharry says.

Already a multi-talented musician -- he plays ukulele, electric mandolin, trombone, trumpet, kazoo and harmonica -- Dicharry picked up learning the guitar only in the last year. But he still needed a beat to ground his music. Enter his custom-built "stompstage" -- a stage that gives him the sound of a kick drum or the clack of a snare drum with the stomp of a foot, and folds up to the size a briefcase.

"I know a lot about so many different aspects of music, and there's certain things that certain instruments do for the music. So if it's not there, and I know it can be, the song just doesn't sound right to me," he says.

Playing the instruments himself keeps his schedule simple as a one-man outfit -- making it possible for him to go play as he pleases. That schedule brings him to the Artist Retreat Center in Bella Vista tonight. Dicharry says the intimate nature of the venue might inspire him to pull out some of his deeper material than he usually plays.

"Right now, I play a lot of bar gigs, and nobody really wants to think about dying at bars," he jokes. Besides life on the road, Dicharry often explores ideas of higher consciousness or coming to terms with death in his writing. A venue like the ARC where people are there solely to listen provides a much different feel from a bar or coffee shop. "There's no distractions in this room. It's all wood -- really, really great acoustics -- and there's nothing up there for anybody to look at. It's just going to be people paying attention" to the music.

The monkey is there to entertain, but maybe to inspire a bit as well. Dicharry says, when he sits down to write a song, he often thinks about other people and how each person around him has a life just as full and complex as his own. He doesn't want to be "preachy" in his music, but just maybe his words can help someone remember that piece of humanity -- and that would be pretty cool.

"All my songs definitely [feel] quite a bit different, and I don't even know if they are any actual messages. But sometimes people forget that other people are people -- they're just like them, just in different circumstances. So I think about that."

NAN What's Up on 01/19/2017