As hard as this might be to believe, I only reluctantly agreed to participate in our company-wide, staff appreciation American Idol karaoke event next week, largely because a co-worker lured me into it with flattering words. She and I had sung "Endless Love" together last year at a marketing team talent show, and in her pitch to persuade me to join her American Idol team, she said that she could not imagine singing without me.
How could I turn that down?
She immediately went to work and poured through the 75-page list of available songs and settled on "Our Day Will Come," by Ruby and the Romantics, a lilting 60s R&B ditty that has a sound of summertime and sunsets.
And because each team must have at least three members, she recruited my boss and another co-worker, all women, and unofficially turned us into 'Austin and the Romantics.'
We 'rehearsed' for the first time yesterday afternoon. Just when I thought to write my workdays off as indistinguishable from one to the next, I found myself sitting in a conference room, singing with my boss.
The song is structurally simple, easily broken up into four distinct stanzas so each of us can have our moment in the sun. At the end of it, we come together and all repeat the last stanza, along with three "our day will come"s before the music fades, hopefully to passionate applause. I then got the idea to see if all my years as a spectator of a cappella groups, as well as my four active months of participation in one, have taught me anything; I decided to arrange a simple four-part harmony for the last three measures so we could really end the song with aplomb.
This work amounted to arranging harmony for four notes, likely a minute effort for even a fledgling arranger. It took me one hour. I have always said that I was a bona fide musician trapped in a non-musician's body, and though I have felt it stir lately, never had I felt that musician part of me want to burst out of my head so badly as I tested chord after chord for consonance.
I unveiled my creation to the group this morning with a host of caveats: this was my first time; I was not sure how it would sound with actual voices; we can scrap the idea if it sounds disastrous. My boss, ever the philosopher, said, "I guess it's kind of like cooking. You know what needs to go together, you might even have a recipe, but you have to taste the end product to really know how successful you are."
And with that, we dove in. With my little iPad keyboard to tap out the notes, we learned our lines of harmony, running them a few times for each of us to imprint our parts into our bodies. Before we put it all together, I took a deep breath. This was a defining moment. Not really, I knew that, but kind of, as if a beautiful sound could free my musician within, could give it a bridge to cross over into the real world. A cacophonous one would scare it back into hiding, right when I felt like it was ready to come out and be someone.
"OK, that was pretty tasty," my boss said with a smile after we cut off the last chord. She looked right at me and nodded vigorously, confirming her assessment and mine as well. "I want to hear it again!"
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