My Big Solo

A few weeks ago I admit that I was lamenting the fact that I had yet to sing the lead on any song during Sunday morning church services. Not that I did it a lot in NoNJ – really, there were only two songs that I did lead on, out of 40, in NoNJ. But I had hoped that after being on the team for over a year my improving voice would get noticed (it has improved a LOT in the past year – sometimes I’m a bit surprised at what I can sound like if the song sits perfectly in my alto range).

At least week’s rehearsal, we were practicing the lead-in song. The lead-in song is done before the service actually starts – it’s to kind of urge people to come in and be seated. Sometimes they are instrumentals, sometimes they are sung. Sometimes they relate to the sermon we are about to hear, and sometimes they don’t. They are just songs that we learn specifically to play before the service actually starts. Anyway, so last Thursday we were practicing the lead-in song, which was originally going to be an instrumental. The song was “Talk of the Town” by The Pretenders.

Now, I don’t like the Pretenders. I haven’t liked them since the Live Aid concert when Chrissie Hynde came off the stage and while doing a post-performance interview with MTV about the plight of the starving kids in Africa she begged off doing the interview and claimed she need a pizza and a beer RIGHT NOW. That ticked me off and I’ve disliked her from that moment on.

As we were practicing the song, our music leader was actually singing the song while we learned it. He realized that the song really shouldn’t be an instrumental, and at the end of rehearsal he turned to me and said, “Hey – would you be up for singing this on Sunday?”

Uh. Okaaaayyy. I mean, I had NEVER heard the song before. NEVER. But I agreed. I spent the next two days listening to the song over and over again – in my car, with earphones walking around the house, and playing along on the piano. Yesterday when I got to the theater to help set up equipment, George asked me if I was going to sing it. “I think I am,” I said.

Our two rehearsals of the song went well yesterday morning – in fact, they were pretty darn good. The one we did in front of the actual service started out rough – I messed up on the timing and basically sang the first two lines of the first verse super-fast because I started late. But after that it went smoothly and I was pleased.

After the service, George’s wife came up to me and said, “I missed it! You have to do it again!” I thought she was joking, but in fact she gathered everyone together and had us do it again just for her and the dozen or so people that remained in the room. *lol*

I told George that I enjoyed singing it, and his comment via email this morning was “Wow – if you do that well singing a song you don’t know by a band you don’t like, imagine if you sang a song you love by a band you actually LIKED!”