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Sing-along Café Thursday, October 23rd, 2025

It was a lovely afternoon in lovely company! 

The first afternoon café was very nice, but we really hope to see more people there next week. It's a good time of day for singing, and one hour is a perfect amount of time. Parking is a bit more difficult during the day, and we have to remember that we cannot enter the parking lot behind the church, the manse lot, because of the small children there. Leave some time to find parking, or park down by Riverwalk Commons, lots of spots there. 

Today’s theme was instrumental parts of songs that we sing along with. "Songs with Instrumentals that we Sing" is the name of my playlist. Sometimes there’s a big brass fanfare or a drum fill or an electric guitar solo that’s so good that we sing that in addition to singing the words, and sometimes it’s the best part, where suddenly everyone is singing (they might not even call it singing, but it is!). Imagine a bar band playing Sweet Caroline. The whole bar sings the "ba-ba-ba!" really loud. I love that. 

One winter season a while back, my YRCC concert was called “The Meaning of Fa-la-la”. My message was that the parts of a song that don’t have words invite everyone to join in, and that is what the holidays are all about: sharing love and including all, peace on earth. Basically, every concert I create has as its underlying theme that singing together fosters peace by building community, which we prove every week as a Community Choir. I hope that these afternoons of singing will do that too.

We talked about the importance of rhythm in music, drums, metronomes, and ba-ba-ba or doot-doot-doot. We talked about places we've lived and artists we loved and respected and some we didn't. We talked about our Christmas Pageant plans and last Sunday's service. We still had lots of time for singing, but did go over our one hour. 

I baked apple cinnamon muffins and also cut up some veggies and made dip for nibbles with our tea.  

Here are some of the songs we sang today:

  • Sweet Caroline by Neil Diamond
  • Baker Street by Gerry Rafferty
  • Penny Lane and When I'm Sixty-Four by the Beatles 
  • Moondance by Van Morrison 
  • Spinning Wheel by Blood, Sweat & Tears 
  • 25 of 6 to 4 by Chicago 
  • In the Air Tonight by Phil Collins
  • Sir Duke by Stevie Wonder
  • Winter Song by Ingrid Michaelson & Sara Bareilles 
1969 album cover

 

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