– by Jillian
Yes, I was there too. I was one of the 140 people who turned up to the Westin Hotel on a sunny Sunday afternoon to help record The Winter Song for charity. The brainchild of #brendadrumm, a single tweet six days previously had galvanised a motley crew into creating a single in a week. Many of us who turned up did so alone. We stuck on our namebadges with our twitter handle and sailed forth into the room. No one stayed alone very long. Cries of ‘Oh, it’s you,’ or ‘haaaloo now I know you’ and ‘hi, I love your tweets’ rang across the room. Like a singles night out we scanned everyone’s name badges to recognise the people we’d being tweeting with, a good number only becoming twitter-friends in the past week.
They say Facebook has cut down the six degrees of separation to four, well I reckon Twitter has sliced a few more degrees off that again. In the crowded room I bumped into my rector’s wife, also an ordained personage (great word that!) and a college chum that I had not seen for twenty years. And on my way up I had been tweeting with another person on the same #TwitterXmasSingle hashtag and it turned out our fathers grew up as neighbours in Cork, bizarre or what?
The buzz in the room was palpable. @icallanan was the musical director and he did a fantastic job. Imagine turning up in a hotel room with 140 strangers and turning them into a choir in an afternoon? Impossible you’d think but he did it. And we sounded pretty good. Apparently we sound pretty good on the tracks too.
The charity is the Neonatal until in Holles street. The retiring master and new, female, master were both there and gave a thankful speech. Ian, our (see, he owns this choir now) musical director gave a speech and Brenda spoke too. She cried a bit as well but that was okay too.
It was very moving. They say that singing in a choir releases those happy endorphins, well the air was full of them on Sunday. I am thankful to say my two daughters did not need any special care when born, both being hearty 9lb plus babies but the thoughts of tiny tots, sometimes as little as half a pound, being cared for is very powerful, especially at Christmas time.
At the end we sang back to the tracks as the cameras clicked and whirled and taped us all. If this single gets into the charts, or even better to number one, then I can say I am a successful recording artist which is one of my #bucketlist ambitions. Wowser!
Even as I left I met three more people on the steps of the Westin and we traded twitter handles and promises to connect online. The world is a very small place with Twitter!
*Listen to the single taster on Audioboo