The Friday Five: Five Rules for Choosing Your Karaoke Song

“For this I will lament and wail; I will go stripped and naked; I will make lamentation like the jackals, and cry out like the ostriches.”

…That verse from Micah (chapter one, verse eight) probably marks one of the earliest references to karaoke in the Old Testament (that’s the first half of the Bible, to all you pagans out there). The simple fact of the matter is that at some point in your life, you are going to have to sing (or at least co-sing) a song in some sort of karaoke situation. Oh sure, I’ve heard all the excuses before “I’d never let myself sink that low” “I’m too careful to end up like that” “I’m a good person”, etc. but the fact of the matter is you can either prepare mentally and spiritually for this kind of thing, or you can just live in denial and be caught totally off guard when it happens to you (and trust me, it will). Bachelorette parties, housewarmings, cookouts, bar mitzvahs…technology has progressed in such a way that karaoke can strike anywhere, at any time, and even if you take every precaution available, karaoke will find you. And when it does, karaoke will show no mercy. Luckily, I’m here for you, and if you follow a few simple guidelines, you can survive karaoke as unscathed as possible…and heck, you might even come out of it with a good story to tell.

Five Karaoke Rules that will keep you from ending up like this guy. You’re welcome.                                                     (Note: The National Anthem is not a great karaoke song choice)

Rule 1: Know your level of vocal ability.
I always think this one is a no-brainer, but then every year I see a new set of American Idol promos (I haven’t watched an actual episode of American Idol since the Clay Aiken/Ruben Studdard season, I was too hurt after watching Clay unjustly lose to ever go back…plus those types of shows are pretty played out) where an astoundingly high number of people can’t sing. It’s one thing to be blissfully unaware that you’re singing is off-pitch (shout out to whoever was standing behind me in church this week*, but you do you, homeslice), but there’s a special level of pain I feel for people that are terrible singers and have NO IDEA! Like whoever is the Paula these days will be like “sorry sweetie, you’re no good” and the contestant will be all like “Psh YOU DON’T KNOW MY WORLD SON, I’ma take my voice and go out and make a million dollars without your show! I voted green party!” and then we never hear or see them again, with the sort-of exception of William Hung, who is on national TV about as often as I am (AKA not very). The moral of the story is: it may be painful, but do whatever you have to in order to figure out how good of a singer you are BEFORE you find yourself in front of a group of people at a karaoke bar or a panel of Randy Jackson types.

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Vocal About Backgrounds (Part One of Many or Maybe Just This One)

Lyric videos are sweet, here’s a lyric video that I  made  found on the internet, using technology. You may be wondering: What makes this lyric video special — besides the fact that it’s one of the songs I sang background vocals on for the new House of Heroes album? Nothing. That is the only special thing about it.

Because Americans are lazy, and usually overweight, I’ve embedded this lyric video (only because I couldn’t link to the cheeseburger that you actually want):

There’s an official, people-filled version of this music video as well, but I’m not posting that version because I think it distracts from the background vocals. Background vocals where I was intentionally asked to sing, not like my usual musical requests which typically vary in range from “please stop” to “stop” to “Denny’s doesn’t have a karaoke night, you need to leave.”

The album, called Cold. Hard. Want., by House of Heroes (feat. Dustin Heveron), releases July 10th. If Carson Daly were still a thing, he would say that the album “drops” on July 10th, to try and sound hip/relevant. Then he’d say some snappy one-liner about the album, something like “Hey, do you have any change I can borrow for cab fare?” Carson Daly had (and maybe still has, I haven’t checked) a talk show on at 1:30 in the morning — its primary competition in that timeslot is the night’s second repeat showing of the Shake-Weight infomercial and a blue screen that plays the Emergency-Broadcast System beep on a nonstop loop. It’s an ideal show for people who fell asleep while Late Night with Jimmy Fallon was on and still haven’t woken up to change the channel, or people who’ve masturbated too furiously for their forearms to have enough strength left to operate their TV remote. People Magazine once praised it as “a show that is on television.” House of Heroes will be on tour this summer, you should go to their webbed-sites for more information, and buy their album when it comes out in July. If you want to buy only the tracks that have my BGVs on them, I don’t blame you, and I will post some sort of list on my webbing-site that tells you which ones have them. I’ll also call them and ask if they’ll release a version of the CD that only has tracks I sang background on, to save you the trouble of having to ask them yourself. Currently there are no plans for them to sell a T-shirt with my likeness on it.

I read a blog post about 27 tips on how to make your blog more accessible to people, and it says you should end posts with a question to the reader. I’m not doing a very good job of following its advice so far.

Cheers,
Dustin