 
MARK LAWRENCE live at Googie’s Lounge, NYC, October 1st 2008
On an almost daily basis, I wonder how up-and-coming singer-songwriters manage to do it these days. You can release your own CD, upload your tracks to the internet, then get in a car with as few people as possible and hit the road, I suppose.  Can you be a one-man business in this modern world, selling your own T-shirts and booking your own gigs and driving yourself from town to town? I guess. I’ve often dreamed of getting a CDL and becoming a self-contained trucking & entertainment industry myself, performing my favorite Marty Robbins tunes at truck stops ’round the country after dispatching giant cords of lumber, a pot-bellied pig named Porky my only traveling companion. Joe Six-Packs and Hockey Moms nationwide could band together and order my 8-Track hits comps from K-Tel! Well, a former beauty queen from The Last Frontier can dream, can’t she? Oh, nevermind…
The thing is, all these thoughts just wash right out of my mind when I witness an actual performance by a great singer-songwriter, if only because the magic of a great performance tends to sweep me up into a world where the technical aspect of being a performer no longer matters. Who cares how the magician does the trick, if the illusion is breathtaking enough, right? Well this is how I felt last Wednesday night when I caught a set by Mark Lawrence at Googie’s Lounge, a small cabaret perched above The Living Room on Ludlow Street in lower Manhattan.