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Of Music and MySpace

Posted on March 6th, 2006

With a winter term comes Blackforest at St. Paul’s and, for a third year, I have made an effort to be on stage. This particular year, I was involved with three performances: one on Friday night, and two on Saturday night.

On Friday, I was together with Jenna again (as we reprised our first time at Blackforest); this time around, we played Sarah McLachlan’s “World on Fire”, a beautiful song with a meaningful message. Practicing was a lot of fun for the both of us, even though they did keep me up later than I usually tend to be on my own! As for the actual performance, I think she did a great job of adapting Sarah’s voice to her own (so that it didn’t sound like a carbon copy of the album). And with no perceivable blunders on my end, the only complaint that I have heard is that we didn’t do more songs!

On Saturday, I was on stage in the early going with Keith, my housemate for the past 6 months. After a couple of practices this week, we got two songs down: Copeland’s “Don’t Slow Down” and Coldplay’s “‘Til Kingdom Come.” The former was changed very significantly from the album version so that it’d sound good on acoustics (and I think that it did)! It was with that song that I broke my singing fast at Blackforest; I usually limit myself to doing backup vocals but I had to do half of the chorus!

And why not break the fast in style? On “‘Til Kingdom Come”, I did the lead vocals (since Chris Martin was kind enough to not sing/falsetto way out of my range)! It’s actually the second time that I performed this song (with the first time at Jasmine’s wedding), but Keith souped it up with some backup vocal and harmonical action. I can’t remember how it sounded, but I don’t think there were any goofs on it…

My final act was with Rodney and Patricia. We focused our attention on European bands (for no good reason other than to have a theme), and we picked out three songs to do as an acoustic trio (using some combination of piano, keyboard, acoustic guitar, and a tambourine): Coldplay’s “Speed of Sound”, Keane’s “Somewhere Only We Know”, and The Beatles’ “Let It Be.”

We really had to work at “Speed of Sound” to find an arrangement that worked without drums and a bass. I think we went through four or five incarnations of the song before we settled on something that sounded full enough! Keane, on the other hand, was quite straight-forward and, because of its simplicity, I think it was the song that we performed best. We wrapped up our set with a classic crowd-participation song, and I remember hearing some of the murmurs as Rodney played the first bit of “Let It Be” on the piano. I had a lot of fun with this song because I got to bumble my way though a short acoustic solo!

All in all, I think that the performances went well. I’m looking forward to watching the video (of everything except the first half of Friday (which included Jenna and me) since the camcorder wasn’t working then) so I can criticize 😛 Thanks to the organizers, volunteers, and performers!

And speaking of music, I’ve been spending an increasing amount of time on MySpace, browsing around artists’ sites and adding some of them to my friends list. I’ve had one for a while but I almost never use it but… maybe that’ll change; it’s a pretty neat site!

Anyhow, I better get going. Ta ta.

One Response to “Of Music and MySpace”

  1. Backguy Says:

    You did a great job on all three performances. Very solid.

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