Skip to main content

Sing-along Café 2024-11-07

This week, we had the best theme of all: Singing! 
Songs about singing and singers was a fun theme-lots of great songs to sing- and they led to lots of interesting conversations. 

We ended up spending some time listening to songs that were not in the theme because we wanted to hear more of a certain singer’s voice. I guess that was on-theme. Singers voices can be so attractive that we are mesmerized or amazed, moved by the sound of their voice as much as by the songs they sing. Two of the singers with outstanding voices were Enya and Ellie Goulding. 

We had a laugh listening to Leonard Cohen sing about singing with his rough voice and barely-singing style, but loved his song and appreciated his offering of it, remembering that one of my Big Beliefs is that everyone can and should sing and that no voice is bad. 

I shared pumpkin muffins that I had baked and made myself a cup of ginger peach tea. It was a lovely evening in lovely company.

Here is a selection of the songs we sang and listened to:
  • Do-Re-Mi by Julie Andrews (from the Sound of Music- can you believe she’s still acting, and is the voice of the narrator, Lady Whistledown, on Bridgestone)
  • How can I Keep from Singing by Enya and by Libera
  • Sing by the Carpenters
  • Sing by Pentatonix (we listened to and watched a few of their videos and were reminded of the Nylons, a Canadian a cappella group- singing without accompaniment is special)
  • Song Sung Blue by Neil Diamond
  • Singin’ in the Rain by Gene Kelly, Debbie Reynolds, and JJ Heller
  • Your Song by Ellie Goulding
  • When Smokey Sings by ABC
  • I’ll Have to Say I Love You in a Song by Jim Croce (another beautiful voice)
  • I Write the Songs by Barry Manilow
  • Magic Power by Triumph (a Canadian band- I'm young, I'm wild, and I'm free. Got the magic power of the music in me)
  • Riptide by Vance Joy (reminds me of singing with my daughters at campfires)
  • Love Song by Sara Bareilles
  • Sing a Happy Song by George McCrae (Sing la la-la-la-la cha-locka-locka-locka!)
  • You Got Me Singing by Leonard Cohen 


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Thursday, April 18 Sing-along Café Review

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 ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Sing-along Café 2025-01-23

Our café last night was so nice! I baked the most wonderful blueberry muffins, with a nice crunchy golden-brown top and juicy blueberries. Everyone wanted the recipe, so I'll include it at the end. Nibbling our muffins was easy, as a few of the songs we sang had very long instrumental interludes.  Our theme was Disney movie music. It was interesting to hear how different eras sounded different, from the 1940's to the present. It was partly the technology developing, but also the styles of music and the kinds of bands and orchestras that were popular. We don't hear a lot of twittering birds in the more recent Disney musicals, or coloratura singing with lots of tremolo. There were a few princesses whose singing we couldn't match.  Listening to and singing all those movie songs, we remembered times we watched them in the theatre or at home on our televisions when we were small and when our children were small. I had a memory from when I was 6 years old, and lots of stories...
Post a Comment
Read more

Sing-along Café 2024-09-05

Our theme was fun! September and School, and Summer too. I'm not going to list all the songs, but you can find them in my Apple Playlist, which you can access here. I had fun making this week's playlist, and we can keep using it for school-themed songs and for summer and fall, and even new beginnings. In fact, we'll use it next week again. We didn't listen to some key songs, so we can do them first (See You in September, She Blinded Me With Science) The fist song, the one that started the list, was September by Earth, Wind and Fire. Later, I found another version which I absolutelty adore. Lots of songs with a school theme came next, and we noticed that most of them had a negative or rebellious tone. School for me was fun and interesting and I loved it. I didn't break rules, I loved them, and thrived among rules and patterns and details. I'm not a rock star. Another thing that stood out in the school theme was love stories, and a focus on the opposite sex (most...
Post a Comment
Read more