Performances that move you

I remember tearing up when a young woman sang “Oh Canada” on Parliament Hill to kickstart the Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation’s CIBC Run for the Cure back in 2002. Granted, that is a particularly emotional run.

Cindy and Kelley
at Friday's performance
Sometimes the lyrics of a song can overwhelm you. Other times, the way someone sings a tune can open the floodgates.

On Friday evening, I had the pleasure of experiencing the perfect storm…beautiful lyrics belted out by an incredibly talented songstress, PEI’s Kelley Mooney.

Opening for another PEI artist, Catherine MacLellan, at the Moncton Press Club, Kelley outshone the headliner. Not only did she perform a number of original pieces from her current album (Tomorrow), she also sang her version of a classic Leonard Cohen tune.

Now K.D. Lang, Jon Bon Jovi and many others have covered “Allelujah,” but Kelley takes it to a whole other level. She rewrote the lyrics to tell the Easter tale, and even Leonard Cohen has given her his nod of approval and agreed for her to record and perform her rendition.

Check out Kelley's moving lyrics for yourself in the following video:



Now imagine that instead of a low-quality YouTube video, you’re sitting in the front row at an intimate venue, getting choked up hearing Kelley play an acoustic guitar and perform this song. I can testify that it’s enough to give you goosebumps and a healthy serving of...

      AWESOME!

Second best would be to pick up Kelley's CD, http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/kelleymooney.

Comments

Post a Comment

Readers' faves

Any excuse to celebrate (my guest post on 1000 Awesome Friends)

Image
I originally posted the rambling below as my first guest blog entry on 1000AwesomeFriends.org , but I'm also re-posting the text here, where it is searchable. (I've written so many posts that the only way I can only avoid repeats by searching my own site to see if I've written about a topic or simply thought about writing about that subject.) Has your birthday come and gone? Are there no statutory holidays on your horizon? There’s no need to wait for a day off from school or work to let loose and shake things up a bit. Just go ahead, pick a festivity from another nation or culture, then find your own way to mark that occasion. As it is, people around the world wear shamrocks, listen to Irish tunes, and eat and drink green food colouring on March 17th. Do we all have ties to Ireland? No, but that doesn’t stop us from whooping it up on St. Patrick’s Day. It’s easy to find something to celebrate. Take today for example, it’s Cinco de Mayo. That party is no longer just
Read more

Retweets for mental health

Image
In five-cent increments, the twitterverse buzzed with tweets that will make millions of dollars flow to support mental health.  From a social-media metrics perspective, the #BellLetsTalk (French version #BellCause) garnered impressive reach, which rivalled #SOTU for President Obama's State of the Union address. Even by adding the long form (#stateoftheunion), as of this morning there was only a five-million gap between the BellLetsTalk hashtag and the State of the Union hashtags. Impressive. How did it happen? Collective thanks to major leaguers, mobile technology, multitudes of do-gooders and an annual marketing campaign for all the activity on January 28, 2014.  Entertainers like William Shatner, Jann Arden and Ellen Degeneres encouraged their fans to retweet the #BellLetsTalk messages about mental health. Thousands upon thousands of followers responded. Millions in all. Who else helped the cause? Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield. Olympian Clara Hughes. NHL franchis
Read more

Ironing boards with quiet mechanisms

Image
Have you ever used an ironing board with a silent opening mechanism? All the ironing boards I've owned or borrowed have shrieked as though cats were being tortured by the fires of Hell. I can imagine that an ironing board with a quiet mechanism, which doesn't wake up people four houses away, would be AWESOME!
Read more