Sing-along Café Thursday, November 20th, 2025

Everyone can sing. Babies sing before they speak. You can sing. Ever go to a sports match and hear taunting songs and celebrating songs belted out by young and old? We sang “Happy Birthday” to Soraya as our first song. Does that song have to be accurate, perfectly in key, enunciated with perfectly formed vowels? No! It’s fun and heartfelt, and a spontaneous expression of community support and affection with a melody that everyone knows. It bothers me when snobby musicians joke about how poorly we sing it, as if we’re even remotely interested in performing it at the opera, or for any other purpose than the one we use it for. I’m also a little sad when people don’t participate, and say that they can’t sing (gah! I understand where that maybe came from but disagree and it make me sad, mad, frustrated)

Paul McCartney has given us so many wonderful melodies to share, stuff that anyone can sing. Hey Jude is my favourite example. Those na-nas! They go on forever and everyone can have fun singing along. Naa na-na, na-na-na-na, na-na-na-na, hey Jude! We talked about how some people gave him a hard time about his song about silly love songs, but we’re all fans- we appreciate his intention and love that song 🎶 We even took parts singing it, spontaneously. Sir Paul is a genius and a master magician 🪄

Here are some of the songs we sang. We were surprised by how many there were (we can have a year of a Beatles theme looking at the other members’ music too) and by how many we knew. I expected more Beatles songs, but we sang more post-Batles songs.

Band on the run
Yesterday
Live and let die
Maybe I’m amazed
Hey Jude
Silly love songs
Jet
Let it be
Another day
Say say say
Blackbird

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