The theme for the evening was: Songs with La-las (and other nonsense: ooh, doo-dah, na-na, scoobie-doobie, bum-ba-bum, hey!).
I call all of these little non-word lyrics la-las. They're often my favourite part of a song. Everyone can sing those words, usually. With scat singing, not usually, and with yodeling, not everyone. But, think about the Beatles song Hey Jude. At the end, everyone can sing along with the na-nas and some of us even like to harmonize with them. When my daughter was writing songs, I urged her to put some nonesense la-las in her songs. Don't worry about finding beautiful, powerful words for all the verses, or all the lines of the chorus. Sometimes, the lack of words makes a melody more powerful.
Here's the list of songs we sang and listened to:
- Can't Get You Out of My Head by Kylie Minogue
- Everything by Michael Bublé
- Those Were the Days by Mary Hopkin
- Hey Jude by the Beatles
- Tom's Diner by Suzanne Vega &DNA
- De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da by The Police
- MMMBop by Hanson
- The Boxer by Simon & Garfunkel
- Da Da Da by Trio
- Da Doo Ron Ron by Shaun Cassidy
- Tutti Frutti by Little Richard
- Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da by The Beatles
- Satisfaction by The Rolling Stones
- Yesterday Once More by the Carpenters
- Ho Hey by The Lumineers
- The Best Day of My Life by American Authors
- It's Not Unusual by Tom Jones
- Rapper's Delight by The Sugarhill Gang
- Don't You Worry 'Bout a Thing by Tori Kelly
- La Isla Bonita by Madonna
- The Lion Sleeps Tonight by The Tokens
- There's a Kind of Hush by Herman's Hermits
- Immigrant Song by Led Zeppelin
- Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious from the Sound of Music
- The Lonely Goatherd from the Sound of Music
- My Lighthouse by Rend Collective
- Fix My Eyes by for King and Country
- Home by Phillip Phillips
- I Ain't Got Nobody by David Lee Roth and by Louis Armstrong
We sang a lot of songs, and I have hours more, so we'll revisit this theme. We have to do last week's theme of instrumental bits again too, because I keep hearing songs and adding them to that playlist. If you think of songs, now that you're aware of these little things, let me know so that I can add them. We'll for sure sing songs from these lists again. Here's a link to the Apple Music playlist for this week's theme.
We'll have new people joining us and we'll want to share these themes with them. Last night we had 2 new people: one good friend from Trinity, and one of the people who were meeting downstairs came up and was so excited, surprised and enthusiastic about what we were doing, he stayed until the end.
What we're doing is simple and fun, but nobody else does it, as far as I know. When I search for pictures or drawings of people singing, they always have a microphone, and often have headphones on, or it's a choir. So, singers are either singing for an audience or alone. We all sing together in community without stars on microphones, without an audience, without competition, no judges, no focus on the quality of our singing. We just sing and enjoy the songs, and talk a little about our reactions to the lyrics or the way the music affects us. We felt like dancing with Tutti Frutti and felt that Led Zeppelin's Immigrant Song was scary. The Police's De DoDoDo, De DaDaDa was surprising and made us a little uncomfortable. Every week we have a song that surprises us in this way: we have sung and danced to the song but never paid attention to the words, and they're not what we expected, or what we've been singing. Tom's Diner surprised us in a pleasant way. The story between all the dit-dit-da-das is really cool. We enjoyed singing My Lighthouse, which was an old praise team song (we should do it again) with a lot of rhythm and energy. It was CCM, contemporary Christian music, but not the only song to bring out for us feelings of awe and gratitude for our wonderful world (next week's theme). Our new friend helped us to see that especially this part of what we're doing is really good, valuable. We are uplifted, often feeling close to God through our thoughtful singing of the words of these songs that we thought we knew. And, of course we feel good just being together.
Having this newcomer, someone from outside of the two founding communities (Trinity and YRCC) was interesting and gave us lots to think about and talk about in the parking lot. It was wonderful to hear that what we are doing every week is attractive and has the effect we want it to have. It was, as always, a lovely evening in lovely company.
Next week, Thursday, April 25th, our theme will be The Beauty of the Earth, for Earth Day (April 22nd).
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