Skip to main content

Sing-along Café Thursday, October 1st, 2026

I'm sorry, sad, to announce that I'm not able to "open the café" today. I'm dealing with a head cold, not terrible but annoying and exhausting. You don't want my germs.

I was planning to choose songs from my Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion playlist. I was thinking about yesterday, Orange Shirt Day, and the news I'm seeing on my socials about rape culture and how they're related. The common factor is the white male focus of our culture. I was reading about the Doctrine of Discovery in my Truth and Reconciliation work. "The Church" was and is such a huge influence on our attitudes about women and other cultures, people from other cultures. It shouldn't be, but Power corrupts. It's heavy, but I'm proud of my church, the United Church of Canada for speaking out against those attitudes and for working to "reconcile" and "restore" the family of God to include all of creation, like the Indigenous Peoples include all creation in their views of "all my relations". It's difficult and painful work, pushing against ages-old ideas of "truth". 

It's a difficult topic, but there is lots of good music, fun stuff to sing even if it's painfully true, and comforting songs about a better way of thinking and believing.  

We'll go back to this theme again, I'm sure. But next week, next week we move towards Thanksgiving and we'll focus on Home and Family. And, I've also started a Gratitude and Thanksgiving playlist.  We can look at that as well. 

Some songs from today's playlist:

  • Jolene by Dolly Parton and by Beyoncé
  • If I Were a Boy by Beyoncé
  • The Man by Taylor Swift 
  • At Seventeen by Janis Ian 
  • Same Love by Macklemore & Ryan Lewis 
  • Another Day in Paradise by Phil Collins 
  • The Way It Is by Bruce Hornsby & The Range
  • Everyday People by Sly & The Family Stone 
  • Beloved by Jordan Feliz
  • Testify to Love by Avalon

 



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Sing-along Café Thursday, October 30th, 2025

We are ready for Halloween!  My theme today was Halloween. I found a couple of playlists of Halloween music on Apple Music, and we started with the one that is designated as a sing-along playlist. Apple Music Sing is a feature that I don't have on my devices, but there are playlists that are made for it, so all the songs on the playlist have scrolling lyrics. That's good enough for us.  We started with a song that we loved singing, but we wondered what made it a Halloween selection. The others were pretty obvious. I made a connection with newer songs about love being magical and the singer feeling like he's under a spell and two much older songs, by Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr. There were a lot of similarities. And, we noticed that those older songs are pretty hard to sing along with. Sometimes we think that new songs are tricky. We laughed about how we "know" lots of songs and can sing the chorus, but have no idea what the words in the verses are, maybe beca...
Post a Comment
Read more

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!" ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Sing-along Café Thursday, November 6th, 2025

Another wonderful afternoon! I was inspired by some planning I was doing for my choir (the York Region Community Choir). I was looking at wartime songs to use for sing-alongs at a performance next week, when I realized that I could add them to a playlist I had. The playlist is "Songs for Keeping Love Alive". We hadn't used it before, so it was new to everyone.  We started with a couple of songs from the WWll era, songs about love and faithfulness surviving a separation. Then, we had a few songs about how a man can show his love for a woman, and how couples can stay together, what keeps a couple going forever (having fun, we agreed). Looking at the lyrics of love songs is always fun. Sometimes, it can be a little embarrassing, funny, and mostly relateable. Something I had intened to sing but forgot was Tie a Yellow Ribbon 'Round the Old Oak Tree by Tony Orlando & Dawn. Next time! There are lots of songs on this playlist that we can do another time.  We talked a lit...
Post a Comment
Read more