Stop me before I sing again...

Last night I karaoked.

Three times, to be exact.

A friend of mine had called earlier in the day and said she was getting a group together to go out for a night of karaoke next week. It had been a while since I had grabbed a microphone and channeled my inner rock star, so I figured that a solo practice run ahead of time might be a good idea. Turns out that 'good idea' was a relative term.

Here’s a helpful tip from Karaoke 101: Before you begin to project your electronically amplified voice across a bar filled with a crowd of strangers, you should probably be somewhat familiar with the particular notes and actual words of the song that you will be performing ahead of time.

I had heard “Hands Down” by Dashboard Confessional during my morning commute into work, and it had been in my head all day. I downloaded the song as soon as I got home and ran through it a couple of times while I made dinner. I thought it sounded okay in my kitchen (the best spot acoustically in the house), but apparently they must have used a different kind of tile or something to cover the walls of the bar where I’d be singing later that night because the final aural delivery was decidedly...different.

My name got called by the DJ within five minutes after I'd arrived and submitted my song selection. Things got off to a decent start, but as the notes began to climb higher towards the final refrains, my vocal cords developed a sudden stubborn reluctance to follow along. Helpful Karaoke 101 tip number two: Allow at least ten minutes after your first drink of Southern Comfort (or your drink of choice) to fully take effect before operating heavy karaoke machinery.

I returned to my seat and seriously considered wiping down my fingerprints from the bar and making a quick getaway from the scene, but I decided to hang around for a little bit longer when the two whitest girls on the planet got up to sing Kanye West’s “Gold Digger.”  In hindsight, I suppose my song had gone okay, but it’s always strange to hear how your voice actually sounds from outside of your head.

I redeemed myself somewhat about an hour later when I sang Simple Plan’s “Welcome to My Life.” Actually, my redemption came courtesy of Billy, the guy who had immediately preceded me. He looked like Michael Douglas’ older, seedier cousin, with his slicked-back hair, too-tight muscle shirt, pleather pants, and a weird orange complexion courtesy of some fake tanning product. I thought that the DJ might have queued up the wrong track when the first few measures of U2’s “Pride (In the Name of Love)" began to play, but Billy dove right in and never looked back, in both the literal and figurative sense.

Billy certainly chose a unique style of delivery for his performance, turning around to put his back almost entirely to the audience while he hunched forward to read the words as they appeared on the 10-inch monitor beside the DJ’s table. Unfortunately the speakers projected every tortured note back towards us in perfect Dolby surround sound. I know that U2 is a very socially-minded group that advocates for human rights and global peace, but they are also Irish after all. I have no doubt that had the band been present in the bar that night, the Edge would have thrown Billy into a headlock while Bono rained blows down upon him until the desecration ended. I imagine that the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. would have looked down in approval as well.

There were actually several very talented singers who took the stage throughout the evening. The best song of the night belonged to two women who brought the house down with “Take Me or Leave Me” from ‘Rent.’ And a pair of college kids got plenty of intentional laughs with their full-throttle performance of Bon Jovi’s “Shot Through the Heart.” Another young woman did a beautiful job singing Eva Cassidy’s version of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.”

Mindful of the saying that bad things tend to happen in threes, I decided to press my luck and go for one final song before last call. By that point I had completely unwound from my day and was just caught up in the fun of singing again after such a long time away. “Black” by Pearl Jam was my third choice, and out of the corner of my eye I noticed several heads around the bar begin to nod along as I sang. Even Billy got back up again later on to perform a not completely cringe-inducing version of Frank Sinatra’s “Fly Me to the Moon.”

All in all, it was definitely a worthwhile night, for no other reason than to have a vocal tune-up before going out with my friends next week. And in the end I realized that no one goes to a karaoke bar to hear pitch-perfect singing, but rather to just let loose for a couple of hours and have fun. It felt good to get up and sing before a crowd again. I was definitely looking forward to the opportunity to do it again next week with my friends. Who knows--it might not be too long before I make it a regular thing.

The tricky part is going to be convincing Billy to show up and sing onstage right before me every time...