Back on the gigging trail?

So I finally got to sing in a company event as an employee.

I say ‘as an employee’ because a few years ago, my band was actually booked to play in their Christmas party.

Anyways, our team of about 400 people celebrated our Christmas party at the Manila Peninsula a couple of weeks ago. The event organizers wanted the party to have an MTV awards theme and wanted some live music so they got some folks together to play as a band. Our makeshift band was supposed to (1) play a 10-minute long opening medley, (2) prepare a birthday song to perform live while the names of the December birthday celebrators were being called, (3) play some appropriate background music while the special awards were being given out, and (4) perform three full songs at the end of the event that would then lead into party music.

It took a really long time for us to figure out what we would do, since coming up with a playlist was a bit difficult. I had a list of songs I knew I wanted to perform myself at the end of the show, but selecting songs for the opening medley was quite challenging since about half the songs in the medley needed to be upbeat Christmas songs. Then we had to match the songs with the different vocalists (there were 6 of us) and then arrange the music such that we could play the best parts of six songs all in ten minutes with fairly decent transitions from one song to the next.

The other bit of a challenge for me was the outfit. The dress code was semi-formal, so my regular gig outfits of short-sleeved shirts would’ve left me feeling severely underdressed. With the help of a few teammates, I decided to go for a Justin Timberlake look – jeans, white long sleeved shirt, vest, skinny tie, fedora hat, and white sneakers. Unfortunately, I didn’t have a vest, a skinny tie, a fedora hat, and white sneakers (or at least I didn't have cool looking ones lol). So I decided to buy all the articles of clothing I didn't have to complete my outfit (yeah, crazy...). When I finally got my look together, I felt it was worth it. Or well at least I thought so hahaha! Here’s a photo of me taken during the event:

We managed to sort everything out, and during the event, I ended up singing a portion of ‘This Christmas’ (Elliott Yamin version of course), a portion of ‘The birthday song’ by the Beatles, ‘Friday I’m in love’ by The Cure, and I closed out the event with ‘Beautiful day’ by U2. All in all, a pretty fun debut performance. And my outfit made it a bit more memorable, too. :)