What a marvellous evening!
We started with Superman just because it’s silly and we broke the ice beautifully with it.
Tonight we were working on the emotions attached to the songs we were singing. It’s important to see past the harmonies and the diction and the dynamics sometimes and really get to the root of what we are singing. Often, a good rehearsal for me involves at least one person crying – not in a mean way but in a way which shows me they are emotionally attached to what they are singing.
We started with ‘Vienna’ which has a really different feeling from the verse to the chorus. We replicate this by using loads of harmony in the chorus but the real power comes from the expression and emotion. We sang this a few times acapella to start with and you can actually hear the difference (it’s around 9-11 minutes on the part 1 audio track). Brilliant work especially when we put the words down and allowed the music to simply wash over us.
‘Linger’ was our throw back song tonight. Always a winner!
Our first treasure at teatime was Jo! Jo (one of our green ladies) approached me to do a little bit of singing together. She chose a beautiful song which really suited her so we got Rich in on guitar and there was a little smattering of a bass part for me…. and our little band was born! It takes a massive amount of courage to stand up in front of your friends and sing your heart out and I think everyone agreed that Jo did a fantastic job – a standing ovation and everything. Check out how long the applause lasts for on the recording! A beautiful song and because it had meaning for Jo, she sang it with all the emotion I’ve been talking about. Thank you to everyone who posted videos – please share them in the group!
Next we sang ‘Just Like Heaven’ which Rich on guitar – I love this one! and also ‘Chasing Cars’ again with Rich. We picked through the harmonies at the end on this one as they keep drifting off – I lose all of the reds. Anyway. it’s all sorted now.
More treasure at teatime!??? The Liberty Belles performed ‘Whole Again’ and ‘(They long to be) Close To You’ for us tonight. Again, massive well done for getting on a stage and showing everyone what you can do. I loved learning these songs with you all and you did a lovely jobs with the harmonies (despite missing voices, missing people etc!)
We moved on the Christmas section starting with ‘Stay another day’ which we started last year online but never really finished. The good news is once you’ve learned the chorus (which the song starts with) then you’re more than half way there as it occurs 5 times!!! Massive thanks to Purple Dave for recording the bass part which I had NO chance of reaching myself – for this song, blue ladies are highly recommended to sing the green part and leave the low blue part to the men. This song is incredibly emotional as it’s about a band member’s brother who died by suicide and how much he’d like one more day with him. Again, I’d like to tap into this emotion.
‘O Holy Night’ was a quick recap of the harmonies for the greens/blues before a run through. (37 minutes in part 3 if you want a listen) Sounding utterly lovely. I’ll take you through the parts again next time so that we can really iron out the creases.
‘2000 Miles’ was a really quick sing through – again the emotion in this song is quite strong – it’s about a band member who died and how much they miss him. If we can tap into that feeling, we’ll sing the song with a different angle and really make it special.
We finished with ‘Do they know it’s Christmas?’ which sounded fantastic!
A really, lovely rehearsal and thank you to so many of you who sat with new people tonight! We had a mix around to be sociable and lots of you embraced this so thank you.
Our next Songbird session in Monday 6th December which seems very early to be finishing so I’ve decided to invite all Songbirds to the Nightingales rehearsal the following week (13th) too. It’ll mean more people in the room but I think we can still safely sing and share our sound together just before Christmas.
Thank you to everyone who sang in person and online xxxx See you soon!