Skip to main content

Sing-along Café 2025-01-16

The first Sing-along Café of 2025 was quiet, just 4 of us, but lovely. I brought some banana bread and buttercup squash muffins that I had baked. Some tea was sipped. And, we sang and talked and laughed.

I had us start with a look at the Christmas and Hanukkah playlist, thinking that we hadn't had enough Christmas music in December. Nah. We were fine. But, we sang I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas

From there, we went free-form. Ian mentioned having seen a video of the Carpenters. I can't remember a propos of what. We sang and talked about body image and eating disorders, enjoying a ton of Carpenters songs on the Apple playlist called Carpenters Essentials. (Wow, did they have a lot of great songs!) There we talked about my choir a bit, and then, from Bless the Beasts and Children (they have no voice, no choice), we talked about Children's rights. It reminded me of the reading I'd been doing about Autism and reminded Thain about her time teaching. 

After the Carpenters, we went on to Musicals. I don't know how we got there, but it was fun! We found the Apple Playlist Classic Broadway Essentials. It inspired so many fun memories: Memories of shows experienced with family and friends, a trip to New York, movies, singing, and more singing. 

Here's a sample of songs from the evening:

  • We've Only Just Begun
  • Top of the World
  • Yesterday Once More
  • Close to You
  • Willkommen
  • Don't Rain on My Parade
  • My Favourite Things
  • Memory
  • Wouldn't it be Loverly
  • Tonight
  • America
  • Anything You Can Do
  • All I Ask of You

Next week, we're going to sing Disney songs. We'll start with the classics, and then move to some of the more recent movies. I can hardly wait. And, I don't have to make a playlist. There are Disney albums and playlists aplenty. Do you think they'll let me sing Let it Go again?





Comments

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 ...

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...

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...