Kaytee Klink & Mike Bass

Mike Bass is playing Mozart's Coffee Roasters on Thursday, October 8, and he's not doing a standard set. He's sharing the bill with Kaytee Klink, and the two of them are putting on a song swap show. If you've seen them separately, you know the drill: Bass is a singer-songwriter who builds his songs around his own voice and guitar, and Klink brings her own songwriting to the table. The swap is the hook here—instead of each taking their own turn, they'll be trading songs, each one taking a crack at the other's material.

That's the whole point of the night. When two songwriters swap songs, you get to hear the same piece of music from two different angles. A song that Bass wrote might lean one way in his hands and shift when Klink takes it over, and vice versa. It's a good way to hear how a song holds up when someone else steps in to sing it, and it gives you a look at how they each approach a melody or a lyric that didn't start with them.

Both are singer-songwriters, so the focus stays on the writing and the singing. With a song swap, the set is built around that exchange, so you'll hear Bass's songs and Klink's songs throughout the evening, rather than one opening for the other. It's a straightforward setup: two writers, two sets of songs, and the two of them trading off.

It's happening at Mozart's Coffee Roasters in Austin, running from 5 PM to 8 PM on Thursday, October 8. If you're around that afternoon and want to hear two local songwriters trade songs, that's the one.