cimorene

It's funny that Music Monday is a thing in the blogosphere because I actually have a Music Monday now - a local karaoke group has their meetings at work from noon to two every Monday. My job is just to unlock the door, help them plug in the karaoke equipment to our bigscreen tv in the conference room, and keep them provided with coffee, sandwiches, and cookies - I'm still working while they're there, but my office is just a sort of alcove off the main area and the volume of the music is uh, VERY loud. Possibly I should wear earplugs for my health, now I think about it.

But it's really fun. They're all so genuinely happy to be there, and it's a kind of diverse group of both Finnish and Swedish-speaking adults. The meetings have been going every week since the second week of the year, with eight at the most and five at the least. I would say that there are only two singers with really good voices - not training, and they still hit false notes occasionally, but good. A couple of them are cheerfully off-key, and one reminds me strongly of Bob Dylan, but since he literally goes outside to smoke a cigarette between every song, I guess that isn't much of a surprise. But the mediocre singing isn't painful to listen to for me, which I guess is a lucky escape since my sister suffers from some extreme audio sensitivities. One of them rides his bike there every week and he even rode it to and from a couple weeks ago through a blizzard, the madman.

I think the group range in age from their thirties to maybe seventies, and a lot of the music they choose to sing is familiar to me, including some Finnish classics like Yö's Rakkaus on lumivalkoinen, which has been sung at least four times.

They've also introduced me to some older Finnish music that Wax didn't recognize when I asked her about it, though! This week's bemusing discovery is Georg Ots' Moskovan valot, apparently translated from Estonian: a mournful, stately crooner waltz. Apparently this guy's popularity started in the 1940s and he died in the 1970s.