It’s been said in order to get better as a musician, you have to play live. It couldn’t be more true for Wil Russoul and Angel Phoenix Damasiewicz.

That’s because “insane” stories happen backstage, according to Russoul.

One of those stories Russoul shared was how he and Ericka Corban found a realistic looking prop head in a refrigerator before a show. Russoul sent a video of he and Ericka Corban finding the prop at the Bishop Center for the Performing Arts.

“That’s how you get rid of pre-show jitters,” Russoul said in the video.

There were a couple surprises on Saturday night, which meant Russoul and his band had to adjust on the fly.

The duo, who played with Steve Leggett on stand-up bass, Christian Svinth on drums and Tiffany Maki on keyboard — grabbed the crowd with an approximate 20-minute setlist at Celebrate Summer Jam in Ocean Shores.

Just before Russoul’s band The Akoostiks played, Russoul said he’d have to play with a guitar that wasn’t his. He also said how Svinth would have to fill in on drums despite never rehearsing with Russoul. Despite those challenges, Russoul was still excited as he mentally prepared backstage inside the Ocean Shores Convention Center.

“It’ll be raw,” Russoul said minutes before their shortened setlist started. The band was originally allotted one hour on stage. The condensed time — about one-third of the original plan — wasn’t going to allow Russoul the time to tell the background stories about the songs he usually shares with an audience. But he had no hard feelings about it.

“As a musician, you can’t get angry,” Russoul said. “That’s just show business.”

But without the time to tell those stories, or the time to play their full set, Russoul had to find another way to grab the crowd. Fortunately for him, at the end of his first song, “Wishing Well,” he was able to summarize the song in a concise way after he sang it, so it didn’t slow down the band in its effort to maximize the time they had.

“I wrote this song for my mama right after my dad died,” Russoul said in his Guitar Galactica T-shirt and black hat, just before the band played the second song on the set, “Orange Waterfall.”

After “Mad Melissa,” Russoul extended an open invitation to the audience members. He said if they wanted to learn more about it, he’d have coffee with them and explain the story behind it.

Russoul was happy to collaborate with Angel Phoenix — her stage name. He couldn’t have been more positive about her soulful performance after she bellowed the high and the low notes with gusto.

“The voice you’ll never forget is Angel Phoenix,” Russoul said about her to the crowd, before he complimented his other bandmates. “It’s only good because of this band behind me.”

Angel Phoenix, who started singing when she was in elementary school and who now teaches music at St. Mary School in Aberdeen, spoke about performing live. Despite the unexpected time limit on Saturday, she sounded like she enjoyed the experience a lot.

“I think that given we came here thinking we’d have a certain amount of time and we had to kind of scramble, cut back, and mix around instruments, it went really well,” Angel Phoenix said. “Everybody just kind of picked it up, followed everybody else and made it a ton of fun.”

Angel Phoenix said to prepare for the set, she and her bandmates had practiced separately before they came together on Saturday. She couldn’t speak any more highly of her fellow musicians.

“They’re wonderful musicians, all of them,” Angel Phoenix said. “They’re great. Christian didn’t come expecting to play a full drum kit. He was going to have a djembe — just a little hand drum — and we didn’t have it, so we were like ‘Oh shoot, we’re gonna have to do full drums’ and he jumped in and went for it. It made it a lot of fun. And the crowd was great too. They’re livening up out there.”

For Angel Phoenix, it’s a lifetime passion to sing. She sang her first solo in junior high.

“I remember singing it and halfway through choking on it a little bit,” Angel Phoenix said. “And then I was like ‘Oh my gosh, that wasn’t fun,’ and then I was like ‘That’s OK. I’ll get better as a I get older.’ And I did. I just kept doing it. I kept going out there and doing everything I could so I could get better.”

She tries to teach her students about being persistent, because it’s about getting out there and continuing to work on your talent and to share it with your audience. Angel Phoenix, and the other musicians who performed Saturday are proof of that.

“That’s the greatest part, being able to share it,” Angel Phoenix said. “That’s what we all like to do as musicians. We share what we write, we share it with other people, we share our skills and teach them how to do stuff. Keep it going.”

Contact Reporter Matthew N. Wells at matthew.wells@thedailyworld.com.

Matthew N. Wells / The Daily World The view from behind Steve Leggett — on stand-up bass — allows for a view of the growing crowd at Celebrate Summer Jam. Leggett played bass on Saturday for The Akoostiks at the music festival that helped kick off an early preview of summer.