Hello everybody on HIVE, and especially the Music Community. My name is Jasper and I'm writing to you from Cape Town in South Africa!
Welcome to "Three Tune Tuesday", an initiative started by @ablaze. It is week 129 overall! My current pattern for how I will be contributing to TTT is to take the Hive Open Mic challenge Theme of the Week and give suggestions on how I would tackle it!
For those of you who are not familiar, the Hive Open Mic is a weekly challenge on the Hive Open Mic community for anybody who loves to sing. You don’t even need to play an instrument, a backing track or a cappella is also fine as far as I can tell!
Different artists are given the chance to choose a “Theme of the Week” that the posts should be based on. Often it can be difficult for people to think about easy songs that might fit that theme… so let me see if I can be of any assistance to the people who still might not know what to try by the time Tuesday comes around!
All right! Let’s get cracking!
Here is the post inviting everyone to participate in this week’s Hive Open Mic (Week 188):
@hiveopenmic/hive-open-mic-188-worldwide-live-music-event
As you can see, it was the turn of @yisusth to pick a theme, and this week the theme is “Fly and Dream”! For those of you that don’t know, @yisusth is a great trumpet player, and he helps run the Music Zone Community on Hive that hosts the weekly Hive Music Festival (currently in its 57th week), and has just started a Song Challenge for people to post brand new original songs that they haven’t shared online or in public before – so if you want to check out some HIVERS being musically creative, check that community out please!
“Fly and Dream” – the funny thing is three songs, and only three songs, came to my mind instantly. Besides the three songs listed below, I can’t really think of anything else that would be perfect… so yes, I’m probably going to attempt one of the three songs below myself… probably on Thursday!
Probably the most obvious song choise of all is “I Believe I can Fly” by R. Kelly… besides the obvious line about flying, he also says “If I can see it, then I can do it… If I just believe it, there's nothing to it” which speaks of “dreaming” in my mind! Here is the original:
You want an even more obvious fit to the theme than that? How about Roxette’s “Wish I Could Fly” where the opening chorus literally goes “I dreamed I could fly, out in the blue… over this town, following you…” Shoo, Roxette was so good – and kind of encapsulates my generation! Here’s the original:
The third song that came to me very obviously? Well here in South Africa, English speaking people have more cultural similarities to the UK rather than USA. We play cricket and rugby like most ex-British colonies. We drink tea. We spell “humour” and “colour” correctly… Hahaha!
Another British custom is that we grew up with the animated film “The Snowman” from 1982 as a childhood Christmas movie. It is based around this beautiful song “Walking in the Air”, written by Howard Blake, and sung by the angelic boy soprano Peter Auty. Another very famous version of the song is sung by another angelic boy soprano, Aled Jones, was used for a Toys ‘R Us commercial in 1985, and that version reached number 5 on the UK singles chart. This has led to some confusion that Aled Jones also sung the film version of 1982 – but I can hear that Peter Auty has a much more distinctive way of rolling his ‘R’s in how he pronounces certain words… (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walking_in_the_Air#:~:text=%22Walking%20in%20the%20Air%22%20is,on%20British%20and%20Finnish%20television.)
Here's the original from the film (Peter Auty):
And here’s the chart topper version by Aled Jones – I’m sure you’ll be able to tell the difference from now on! Hahaha!
So that's week 129 done and dusted! I hope that gave some people some ideas on how to tackle the Hive Open Mic Challenge this week? Perhaps I’ve even inspired one or two new people to give it a try? Please let me know!