Everybody Now! My Very Short Stint as Lead Vocalist

January 10, 2009 is a little blip in my lifeline. I guess you can say that I got to live out a fantasy of being a rockstar. It all started with a company event, a kick off party. Now these events usually showcase the upper- and mid-management at their most vulnerable, sort of like a payback time for the ranks. The original plan was to have all supervisors perform a dance number. While I could move to a beat sometimes, I am actually better at singing to a tune. One other supervisor would rather deliberately fracture his feet than join the dance number. So his brilliant idea was to form a band where he would play drums, another supervisor and two associates would play the guitars with me as the singer. Ii sounded like a good idea at that time, anything is better than dancing to the hiphop song "Elevator" at that time.

But what shall we do for a song? or an entire set (we got a bit ambitious you see). Since the event's theme was "rockstar" then we should do some rock tunes. I was given the priveledge of picking the songs I can comfortably sing and REM's Losing My Religion immediately came to mind. But I realized the song is more alternative rock than rock rock. The other supervisor probably has this long standing fantasy of hitting the drums to the tune of the Black Crows' Hard to Handle, sure let's do that as well. But this song is more on the rock funk side and we needed something that is, without a doubt, a rock song. Then we agreed on Live's Selling the Drama (you can't get more rock than that). We also added Toad the Wet Sprocket's All I Want in the mix just for good measure. Now our work does not really give us the luxury to learn and practice the songs together so we practiced individually in our own time and we thought we'd just polish it in a studio for two hours (we actually felt we were that good).

By practice day we realized we can't get away with just two hours together, and another supervisor who loathed public display of dance wanted to join and do a song too. Her number was Meredith Brook's Bitch. After listening to ourselves practicing we agreed that Hard to Handle was out of the question. We just couldn't cut it. We also realized that the song All I Want just came out wrong. So finally we decided to do just the other two song's and the new sup's Bitch number.

I really have little qualms about singing. It's something I know I can do. But live performances have a way of getting really messed up. The only thing that kept us at it is the fact that we wouldn't have to dance. Nothing really prepares you for a performance before an audience of around 100 of our customer service representatives, upper management and a client from Dublin. In the end though, when we finally got to the real deal, I just had as much fun with it as I could. And so did the audience. We messed up some but got really good raves. We even got videorecorded. On playback it wasn't spectacular but hey, it wasn't really that bad. I guess it sounded the way a four-hour rehearsed mini set should sound. Now I'm sharing it here, my apologies.