Trinity Newmarket Singers

Our dance theme turned into a Taylor Swift theme!  We started off looking at my Pride Affirming playlist which I filled with a lot of dance music, some of it recommended by Kai, for the potluck and dance party Saturday night. So, there’s some Christian dance music on there, and there are songs from different eras, so that it’s inclusive of all ages.  My list was sorted in alphabetical order by Title. First, I played a dance remix of John Legend’s All of Me, and then the original. We listened briefly to APT, but then saw Dancing Queen, and loved singing with ABBA, music from our era, and I remembered that Madonna had sampled that ABBA song (Gimme, gimme, gimme from 1979) in her dance song, Hung Up in 2005 on her Confessions on a Dance Floor album. That sent us down a rabbit hole to Taylor Swift somehow. And, you’ll see we gave Ian (new to Taylor Swift, idk how) a big overview of Taylor Swift’s varied styles of music, especially some fun songs to dance and sing with. We talked b...

 La-las are my favourite thing! I love when a song has a good strong section of nonsense syllables that anyone can sing. We’ve already spent a couple weeks in my “La-las and Other Nonsense” playlist in the past, and I’m sure we’ll spend many happy Thursdays here in la-la land again.  I was inspired by last week’s last song, Meghan Trainor’s Good to Be Alive , with its very catchy Oh-oh oh chorus. This week, my list didn’t disappoint. We started the evening off with talk of our struggles and aches and pains, rodents, and news of the roof leaking, bubbling, plaster falling. We ended up laughing and dancing in our seats (we should have stood up, but aches…) and wonderfully uplifted. Happy memories of our youth, courting and dancing, concerts and discos, singing more nonsense because we didn’t know the lyrics: the music brings back such joy.  Na-na Hey-hey Kiss Him Goodbye by The Supremes, by Steam, and by Bananarama were all not as good as our memories of yelling that ch...

What an interesting evening we had!  The plan was to sing songs from a Mother’s Day playlist, and we did end up with a lot of talking and singing about mothers. But, we started with my funeral playlist, or rather my “MyFuneral” playlist. Funerals were the first topic last night, apropos of some recent experiences. We talked about how they can be inspiring and celebratory, or not. We hope that ours will be wonderful. To that end, I started a playlist of songs to suggest to my children. I want to ease some of the burden of the planning that too often comes abruptly, suddenly, and while you’re feeling bereft and overwhelmed. I also have a “death binder” on my computer, a folder of important documents and information about what my preferences are for what is done when I die. This was inspired by a newsletter I signed up for in 2021 “Dying Kindness” by Cianna Stewart. (She now has a podcast.)  My death planning is one of the many weird ways that I try to be a good mother. And, a th...

It’s May!!!? This year is flying by.  We had another lovely night singing songs by Canadian artists. We think we can probably sing only songs by Canadians for a year and never run out of songs that surprise us. And this is just songs that we can sing along to. There are Canadian opera singers, and jazz artists, and French singers, for example, whose music we wouldn’t be able to sing along with. There are big names in Canadian music, composers and performers of instrumental music, like Oscar Peterson or Moe Koffmann, Liona Boyd, Maynard Ferguson, Frank Mills whose music we're familiar with (I think I added these for Ian’s family). It’s wonderful that we Canadians have so much music in common. So many household names and common melodies that our ours.  I just realized I had forgotten Shawn Mendes! I’m sure I’ll be adding to that list forever. Ah!Amanda Marshall. So much more to sing.  Next week, please don't forget that we're not meeting on May 8th . I'm going to have a ...