Skip to main content

Sing-along Café 2025-05-22

 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 chorus at sports events. Brilliant. Genius.

That’s The Way by KC and the Sunshine Band. Brilliance: aaaahhh! that’s the way, uh-huh uh-huh, I like it, uh-huh uh-huh! And repeat that as long as the dance floor keeps moving.

I’m Gonna Be (500 miles) by the Proclaimers is also great fun to (drunkenly) dance to while yelling da-da-dat-da! But we loved the JJ Heller version, sweet and easy to sing along with.

Sweet and tart cranberry muffins took forever to eat because we were talking and singing so much. It was a lovely evening in lovely company. Next week, Thursday, May 29th, we’ll sing dancing songs to prepare for our (potluck) Dinner/Dance on Saturday, May 31st! 

Here are some more of the songs we sang last night:

  • If I Had $1,000,000.00 by the Barenaked Ladies
  • Hungry Like a Wolf by Duran Duran
  • Sing by Ed Sheeran 
  • Undun by the Guess Who
  • Immigrant Song by Led Zeppelin 
  • Supercalifradilisticexpialidocious from Mary Poppins by Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke
  • My Lighthouse by Rend Collective
  • Fix My Eyes by For King and Country
  • The Lion Sleeps Tonight by the Tokens
  • More Than Words by Extreme
  • How Deep is Your Love by the Bee Gees





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