Antidote in times of trouble: Friday night karaoke in the living room
It’s become a weekly COVID-era pacification in our house: Every Friday night, my 30-something son, his 20-something brother and their Joni/Aretha wanna-be mother shut the living room windows so as not to disturb the neighbors.
Some families do crafts and take bike rides to stave off the COVID-19 slumps.
We bring out the amp and microphone I got for Christmas one year.
And for a few hours, we croon our multiple cares away, them with their signature Hozier and Vampire Weekend, me with my Whitney Houston and Carly Simon, all of us calling up family standards, Don McLean’s “Miss American Pie,” Arlo Guthrie’s “The City of New Orleans,” anything Beatles, Avett Brothers, Stevie Wonder or Simon and Garfunkel.
No throwaway “Fever” here, we are serious about our karaoke, maintaining personal queues and focused on crowd pleasers, accurate imitations and multiple genres. Raucous singalongs and air guitar are not unheard of.
Our “Bohemian Rhapsody” shakes the mice out of the rafters.
We are, after all, a family who sings, our built off generations of listening and singing to music. Starting with my and my husband’s childhoods, we have gathered tunes to thread the years, from “West Side Story” and “Sound of Music” hits, to Motown, Crosby, Stills Nash and Young, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, disco, reggae, Billy Joel, Elton John and the ballads of Jimmy Buffett. These were the songs we’d crank up and belt out on long family road trips, which the kids started adding to as they got older, Indie bands, Mumford & Sons, rap.
And now on any given Friday, all these genres will be covered with decided differences between COVID-sequestered Mom & Sons: Their voices are mega-trained, mine is wrought of a couple of seasons of lessons I bought to accompany the amp and mike. They know hiprepertoire hop. I’m more comfortable with funk.
I’m also the one who can go long on stories to accompany my song choices.
“This song reminds me of a boyfriend in Colorado,” I say.
“Wow, Mom, how many boyfriends did you have?” they say.
As with COVID-19, there are lessons to be learned when doing intergenerational karaoke with your children:
Resist telling about every boyfriend every song reminds you of. Don’t feel intimidated because they had years of middleschool, high-school and university-choir training and you didn’t. Try not to sob when singing sentimental songs (see boyfriends above). Don’t cringe when they also reveal intimate thoughts you didn’t know.
‘This song reminds me of my first girlfriend in eighth grade,” my eldest says, as he begins to sing “I’d do anything just to hold you in my arms” by Simple Plan.
Get a few things figured out, and what can emerge is ecstasy, not the drug, but the feeling that means you’re happy. Remember happy?
It’s been an evolution through the weeks. My voice has grown more confident. The differences between my sons and me have become educable moments, them teaching me the meaning behind rapper Kendrick Lamar’s stark words, me teaching them that Stevie Wonder was and still is an activist, even if he is ancient. We have developed with each passing week a knowledge of what can bring down the house, my “Angel” by Sarah MacLachlan, anything Disney by Chris and Benjie’s “Helplessness Blues” by Fleet Foxes. We’ve dipped into “Hamilton,” Weird Al and late at night, Frank Sinatra and Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World.”
Sometimes Karaoke Night morphs into Karaoke Morning. The other night, we were up til 3:30, every tune bringing transformation, moving us away for a short time from masks, social distancing and political activism and unrest, into something easy.
“Take it easy, take it easy.
Don’t let the sound of your own wheels drive you crazy.”
For the love of song. “Whatever gets you through the night, it’s all right, it’s all right,” and then some.