Karaoke Lounge

DNTO The Sing-Song Show (Why we sing)

Here’s a wonderful podcast from CBC’s DNTO (Definitely Not the Opera) that aired a few weeks ago about why we sing.  The host, Sook-Yin Lee and guests, interview people on the street, in hospitals, professional musicians, an anthropologist and others to discover why we sing even if we can’t sing well.

As the host Sook-Yin Lee says in the introduction to the podcast  “When I sing my heart out, it’s one of the very few times that I can feel authentically myself … but it’s a scary thing to do, to reveal yourself to someone … the reason why it’s so terrifying to reveal your serious singing is cause you might suffer awful rejection when people say you sound horrible”.

Highlights of the podcast :

• Nick Purdon interviews the “singing dog walker”, a woman in a dog park, who makes up songs to sing to her dog, she graciously demonstrates her talent.
• Kate Friesen, sings one on one with isolated elderly patients, including Nelly, a 90-year old, alzheimer’s patient who lightens up with song.
• Grant Lawrence, of Radio 3 fame, tells his story of being a young lead singer and having to sing a gig on the sidewalk in front of a bar, because he was too young to be in the bar.
• Harmony is explained and superbly demonstrated by Immaculate Machine siblings, Brook and Caitlin Gallupe.
• Sook-Yin talks about her step mother, dressing up in a gown to sing karaoke on her giant screen tv, transforming from her daytime bank loans officer personality into a glitzy lounge singer with swaying hips and very elegant hand gestures.
• Sook-Yin takes it to the street and convinces people to ad lib singing songs with her, in operatic, country genres.

Sook-Yin concludes that singing transforms us, it allows us to be who we are and also who we want to be. 

Here is more of Immaculate Machine with their harmonies being themselves in their music video for their song Jarhand.

I sing because singing lets me express feelings that I can’t normally express.  Singing almost always makes me feel better. I like the challenge of learning new songs, including songs in my second language, French.  I’d love to sing songs in a third language, but I’m not there yet.

Why do you sing?

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