Blog

We're on the road just driving back from the U.S. We've had a busy few days!

FRIDAY

We had a great show in Strathroy, ON on Friday night. We did our usually singing and stage shenanigans for most of the show and then for the last 2 songs we brought out Luke Stapleton. Luke is a beatboxer or as some people call it: a vocal percussionist. He basically makes drum sounds with his mouth. It’s pretty cool, Luke is great at it, and the audience ate it up.

Speaking of eating, the promoters of the show were awesome enough to honour our original gig (singing in the parking lot of an ice cream parlour) by having ice cream sundaes available to everyone in the crowd at intermission.

We didn’t indulge during intermission because any dairy product on your vocal chords makes you sound like Kermit the Frog. Also, Thom only eats sundaes face-first with his hands tied behind his back and that tends to make a little mess on his stage wardrobe. We did, however, more than make up for it after the show, and we were able to find Thom a bib.

SATURDAY

From there, we drove overnight to Reston, VA (near Washington, DC) for an acappella festival called SingStrong.

We arrived at 9:30am Saturday morning. We had slept in short spurts in the car but horizontal is our unanimous favourite in terms of sleeping positions so the early check-in by the Westin Reston (yes, it rhymes) was much appreciated.

In the afternoon, Janet and Jo3 judged a high school level acappella contest. Judges were supposed to only take 8 minutes to deliberate but these groups were SO good, the judges were all blown away. They took much longer than the allotted 8 minutes to declare a winner. Understandable considering how talented everyone was!

Following that, we gave a seminar on arranging acappella music. We started the seminar and didn’t really know the "level" of the people in the room. We yakked and yakked and sang and played a few tunes to show examples of what we were talking about. To make a long story short, given the types of comments and questions we were getting, halfway into the presentation we realized that we were in a room of colleagues, not students. There were a lot of people in there that had done quite a bit of arranging themselves and we even got suggestions from them on changes we could make to some of our arrangements!

That night we performed a concert with a bunch of amazing groups: the winner of the high school contest we had just judged (Chamber Singers from South Lakes High School), West Side 5 and the host group Blue Jupiter (New York), Fii (Austria), The Glue (Switzerland), The Bobs (U.S. West Coast), and Street Corner Symphony (Nashville). The show was great. We were amazed at the SingStrong organizers for being able to pull off such a show. We caught most of every other act's show, either from backstage or from the back of the auditorium if we had time to get around so we can say this: all of the acts were amazing and we made sure we did our very best on stage since we were representing all of Canada!

Pretty long day so far, right? Well it wasn't over. There was an "afterglow" at the hotel. Afterglows sort of emerged from barbershop conferences and it's just a social time at a bar where people chill out and have a drink but also established and newer groups take turns performing a song or two. The beer was cold and the singing was hot. Just our kinda party.

SUNDAY

A much shorter day today which was fine by us as sleep deprivation is not our thing.

Thom, Dan, and Jo3 headed for a quick tour of the White House while Janet and Luke (remember, the mouth drummer we mentioned above? he was with us on this trip) caught up on some sleep. Strange note, the boys said it's called the White House, but it's more of an ivory.  Strange.

We then did another show with some of the groups from last night: The Glue, West Side 5, and The Bobs.

The Bobs were the most "seasoned" act of the weekend and were also the oldest having formed 30 years ago. Maybe you haven't heard of them, but people in the acappella world definitely know who they are. As a result of this meeting, we've decided to include a Bobs song in a special song medley we're creating. We think you'll like it when you hear it.

Then after all of this, we jumped in the van and headed for the border.

All in all, we had a great weekend and were appreciative of all of the new friends we'd made but we’ll also be glad to be home soon because we'd love another horizontal sleep.