Five Parties With My Worst Enemy by Sharpe Elle

Author:Sharpe, Elle
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-12-07T00:00:00+00:00

The set list that night ended up being pretty stellar.

“Bust a Move,” was followed by “Walking on Sunshine”—I clicked my tongue for the drums, and hummed for the saxophones. I sang both parts to “Ain’t no Mountain High Enough.” Then all five parts to “Wannabe,”—and I included those footstep sounds at the beginning, by tapping on the side of the piano.

Each time I pulled a song request from the bucket I did a mental scan of the whole thing, remembering the instrumentals, lyrics, and even the minor sound effects. I always made an effort to include as many little details as possible, which forced me to be highly inventive with the types of sounds my mouth could produce.

This always seemed to be one of the biggest draws for people, and they started requesting songs with weirder and weirder sounds, just to see if I could rise to the challenge. 80s songs were popular for this reason. It started with “Never Gonna Give You Up,” a classic choice with plenty of synths, plus those comically deep vocals. Later some smart aleck gave me the Yazoo song “Situation,” but I was prepared. People often tried to trip me up with that Alison Moyet laugh sample, so I’d gotten pretty good at it.

I had a superb knowledge of pop music, as you may have guessed. But I couldn’t remember everything, or reproduce every song perfectly on the fly. That was a part of the show too. Watching me mess up, laugh, try again, get stumped on the same part, keep forgetting the same lyric. That was how the audience earned “points,” although no one was really keeping score.

Sometimes if I forgot the words I would ask the crowd to shout them out to me, and thankfully they did. The evolution into a group sing-along was natural. I had to admit Ronan had been right. The fancy people weren’t quite as snotty as I’d feared. In the end they behaved pretty similarly to the audiences at my other shows.

Near the end of the set things go a little quieter. As the older folks finally gave in and joined I got more requests for things like Bob Dylan, Carol King and The Beatles. The evening closed out with a rousing group rendition of “Hey Jude.” By that time the novelty of the vocal looper had faded into the background, and people were simply enjoying the music together.

I ended up singing, playing and looping for three hours straight. I didn’t even feel the time go by.

The party was ending. Happily worn-out guests started leaving the hall in dribbles and drabbles.

A few curious folks approached me after my set was done to ask about how the vocal looper worked. I showed them how my set-up allowed me to record on many different tracks—a lot more than most people used. I walked them through some layering, let them play around making some noises into the mic. When people got excited about my little machine it always made me excited too, all over again.

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