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mcroftSo, following all the fun Ginger had participating last spring in National Karaoke League, I decided to give it a go. Team Bringing the WTF is dedicated to finding and singing songs that make the audience, or some portion of the audience, say "WTF?"
Ginger has been rocking hard, a real backbone for the team, and I think she has three songs under her belt so far. Each performer has to sing twice.
I sang first out of the chute for team when the league started, with "The Bad Touch", a few weeks ago. It was OK, but it didn't really grab the audience. I've been working on a few options, at least one of which I think is really ready to go and several which, after rehearsal, I think may not be karaoke material.
Last night, week 4, was a tough week for the WTFers. Our team of eight had four absentees. I blame the Harmonic Convergence. Given that each team has to do two solos and a group song, we were all on the mic.
It was also theme night. Round one had to be about "New York, New York", round two was "Austin City Limits" and round three was "Going back to Cali". We didn't really have a solid line-up going into our group drinkalong/rehersal on Wednesday, but we had some ideas. It wasn't until noon on Thursday (show day!) that we had a song list.
Cali was "I Touch Myself". It was the group song and Ginger sang lead. She was dressed as Dov Charney, the LA "American Apparel" dude. I was a sleazy photographer, and Heather and Sara were models who I was photographing, lewdly. It was a trip. Heather brought her signature "Fuck with the Lyrics" style to the backing vocals, and some people A) got it and B) laughed.
Austin was a "Slacker" homage, involving Sara singing "Material Girl" and involve her dressing like the girl who tries to sell Madonna's pap smear. And drinking it. Sadly, I'm not sure how much the audience got the reference.
Between rounds, they do games to fill the time while they count up the score and Heather got called on for Karaoke Roulette. Number 31 was "I Think We're Alone Now" and Heather did a pretty nice job, especially when she went off-road and started singing about how "you can get to third base, maybe put it in a little bit, but my parents will kill us if you get me pregnant". It's really what the song was about.
So, I was actually up first, with the New York entry. I pulled on a punk (pogues) T-shirt, leather jacket, shades, and poofed my hair out and became Joey Ramone, if Joey were 40 something, twice as big as he is, and had a lot less hair on his forehead.
I sang "The KKK Took My Baby Away", which is (allegedly) about how Johnny Ramone stole Joey's girlfriend. The lads from Queens are a signature NYC band, so we were somewhat afraid someone else would sing a Ramones song and we'd have to rochambeau for the rights to it last night. Luckily, that didn't happen.
Rehearsal was sorta shaky on it, but it was good to hear exactly the version they had and I had it on my iPod and went out into the parking lot after work and sang it a lot, getting a feel for how I could sing it best. I felt like it was significantly improved from Wednesday night.
There was a lot of audience participation, right from the start, and it's pretty amazing to hear 50-60 people singing along with you from the audience. I played it up; pumped my fist in between verses, picked up the mic stand and all that stuff. I also played with the lyrics a bit in the "sing the chorus four times at the end of the song" part of the song. Instead of "KKK", I sang "the NKL took my baby away". For obvious reasons, the National Karaoke League went nuts for this. I aim to pander. :) The funny part of that was that my phone's spellcheck made that 'correction' for me as we were discussing what we'd do yesterday afternoon...
We didn't 'win' a single round (there was good-to-great stuff from half or more of the teams in every round) but we got complements on our stuff from people whose stuff I've enjoyed and I had a lot of fun. Ginger and I stayed up later than we should have talking about it, because it takes a bit to come down off the performance high.
Gabba, Gabba, Hey, y'all.
Ginger has been rocking hard, a real backbone for the team, and I think she has three songs under her belt so far. Each performer has to sing twice.
I sang first out of the chute for team when the league started, with "The Bad Touch", a few weeks ago. It was OK, but it didn't really grab the audience. I've been working on a few options, at least one of which I think is really ready to go and several which, after rehearsal, I think may not be karaoke material.
Last night, week 4, was a tough week for the WTFers. Our team of eight had four absentees. I blame the Harmonic Convergence. Given that each team has to do two solos and a group song, we were all on the mic.
It was also theme night. Round one had to be about "New York, New York", round two was "Austin City Limits" and round three was "Going back to Cali". We didn't really have a solid line-up going into our group drinkalong/rehersal on Wednesday, but we had some ideas. It wasn't until noon on Thursday (show day!) that we had a song list.
Cali was "I Touch Myself". It was the group song and Ginger sang lead. She was dressed as Dov Charney, the LA "American Apparel" dude. I was a sleazy photographer, and Heather and Sara were models who I was photographing, lewdly. It was a trip. Heather brought her signature "Fuck with the Lyrics" style to the backing vocals, and some people A) got it and B) laughed.
Austin was a "Slacker" homage, involving Sara singing "Material Girl" and involve her dressing like the girl who tries to sell Madonna's pap smear. And drinking it. Sadly, I'm not sure how much the audience got the reference.
Between rounds, they do games to fill the time while they count up the score and Heather got called on for Karaoke Roulette. Number 31 was "I Think We're Alone Now" and Heather did a pretty nice job, especially when she went off-road and started singing about how "you can get to third base, maybe put it in a little bit, but my parents will kill us if you get me pregnant". It's really what the song was about.
So, I was actually up first, with the New York entry. I pulled on a punk (pogues) T-shirt, leather jacket, shades, and poofed my hair out and became Joey Ramone, if Joey were 40 something, twice as big as he is, and had a lot less hair on his forehead.
I sang "The KKK Took My Baby Away", which is (allegedly) about how Johnny Ramone stole Joey's girlfriend. The lads from Queens are a signature NYC band, so we were somewhat afraid someone else would sing a Ramones song and we'd have to rochambeau for the rights to it last night. Luckily, that didn't happen.
Rehearsal was sorta shaky on it, but it was good to hear exactly the version they had and I had it on my iPod and went out into the parking lot after work and sang it a lot, getting a feel for how I could sing it best. I felt like it was significantly improved from Wednesday night.
There was a lot of audience participation, right from the start, and it's pretty amazing to hear 50-60 people singing along with you from the audience. I played it up; pumped my fist in between verses, picked up the mic stand and all that stuff. I also played with the lyrics a bit in the "sing the chorus four times at the end of the song" part of the song. Instead of "KKK", I sang "the NKL took my baby away". For obvious reasons, the National Karaoke League went nuts for this. I aim to pander. :) The funny part of that was that my phone's spellcheck made that 'correction' for me as we were discussing what we'd do yesterday afternoon...
We didn't 'win' a single round (there was good-to-great stuff from half or more of the teams in every round) but we got complements on our stuff from people whose stuff I've enjoyed and I had a lot of fun. Ginger and I stayed up later than we should have talking about it, because it takes a bit to come down off the performance high.
Gabba, Gabba, Hey, y'all.
