culture / music

Open Mic Adventures XLIX: Sloppy “Hipster Girl Next Door” Medley

The Portly PoliticoLeave a comment

This past Friday, 22 September 2023, I played a gig at a local coffee shop with my buddy John.  I was recovering from a sinus infection, but through a combination of cough drops, water, and tea, I soldiered through and managed to hit quite a few high notes—woooooot!  It also helped having John there to carry lead vocals on several tunes.

It was a sloppy performance on my end—I mixed up the lyrics to a song I have been singing for eleven years!—but I’m chalking that up to the sinus congestion and my slowly diminishing mental faculties.  The result, regardless, was an absurd, self-indulgent, over-the-top, ridiculous, long closing number to a very fun show.

John and I have been tossing various tunes onto the end of “Hipster Girl Next Door” for years—the earliest notes I have indicate a “Valentine’s Day” medley dating back to February 2013—and we sometimes try to outdo ourselves with how many random songs we can toss into the mix.  As long as they’re in A major or A minor (or, occasionally, F# minor), we can plausibly spin them into comedic, musical gold.

I played and performed poorly on this one, but I still had a great deal of fun:

Kudos to you if you lasted the full eleven-plus minutes!  The lady dancing in front of us was a very sweet lady named Ollie.  She purchased one of the two remaining physical copies of Contest Winner – EP from my merch table, and really loved our performance throughout the night.  She made multiple requests—Elvis, The Beatles, Elton John, The Bee Gees—throughout the night, and that kind of audience interaction is always a blast.  John and I had never seen her before, but she is apparently a lay reader for the church that operates the coffee shop, and was a real ray of joy.  Sometimes it felt like we just had to perform to her and it would light up the whole room.

Also, one of my former piano students, Hayden, showed up unexpectedly with his older sister and one of my current students!  Hayden was a piano student of mine for nearly six years, and is off to college now.  He graciously endured filming this epic-length concert closer on my iPhone SE, and it was great to catch up with him afterwards.

Happy Listening!

—TPP

Other Editions of Open Mic Adventures:

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