Fringe 2011 here we come!

Soooooooo last night the cast of Zombie High School got into the 2011 Fringe Festival! That means we'll be coming at you with a new show this summer. Will it be Zombie College? Robot Salon? Poop your Pants the musical? Only time will tell.

Watch Berko nervously anticipate the start of last night's lottery.

Happy almost my birthday month!

In honor of my birthday being a mere 16 days away, I made you a playlist birthed from 6 months worth of Shazammed songs from my iphone. "What does that mean?" a non-iphone owning individual might ask. Well. Shazam is an app that you turn on when you want to identify a song you're listening to. So each of these songs were so amazing, curious, or sentimental to me that I risked my life, likely driving, to look them up as fast as I could so I would never forget them.

I present to you, my Shazam playlist. You will enjoy. That's a threat.

Ukulele Fun

I got the best text message I have ever received earlier this week:

PS a ukulele will arrive at your house on Wednesday.

I am now a proud co-owner of "Ukie", the world's cutest and most Hawaiian ukulele.

I've never played a guitar before in my life. I have no idea how to strum, or play chords, or even hold it. But beef and I downloaded a few chord finder and tuner apps and chose two songs to start with.

Here is my extremely professional and heartfelt version of Hey Jude, dedicated to my sissy:



Here is Tom's haunting rendition of Somewhere Over the Rainbow:

Is this not just a delicious, delicious sound?

This is my week of concerts. Sunday - Dirty Projectors. Monday - Rogue Wave. Tonight - Arcade Fire. Dirty Projectors were just, well I'll just use a word my friend Troy coined to describe them. They were "eargasmic". And Rogue Wave, though I've had the pleasure of seeing them twice before, was just, well they were a barrel of amazing. They have so many great songs, but every time, no matter what, I just end up being such a sucker for "Lake Michigan". I mean with a two minute drum intro, who can resist?

Please enjoy my iphone's crappy take on said drum intro. Though you can't see much, you can hear everything, and oh the sound my friends. Oh the sound!

Ok I'm going to start mentally preparing myself for Arcade Fire. Can you believe it? I love this city. And by this city I mean Minneapolis/St. Paul. I don't discriminate.



Update!! Arcade Fire was so good my eyeballs fell out of my head then I had to clean them and put them back in. I waited the WHOLE CONCERT for this song and by gum, it came. The finale of the finale. I start uncontrollably dancing in the end so...sorry for the shakiness. Kind of. Ok no I'm not sorry.

If only I had moves like this.

Will you just look at that one-handed air-keyboard player go?

Too soon? Sorry, Haiti.

When disaster strikes, there are lots of celebrity artists that want to step up and help.

Even at Minnesota Public Radio!

Listen: Haiti Relief Song

10 artists. 1 (un)clear message. 2 female pop star impressions by your favorite blogging public radio employee.

Allow me to serenade you.

For the record, my a cappella group has been together far longer than Glee or the Sing Off ever existed.

Moving on.

Last night we had a little recording session and one of the songs is a Rilo Kiley ditty that I sing the solo in. Please enjoy.

Download or play: Breakin' Up (Rilo Kiley) by Late Night Menu.

And just to prove to you that I actually can successfully rap at times without making a complete fool of myself, last night we also recorded that Duffy song that I embarrassed myself with during our last performance.

Download or play: the sweet rap part of Mercy (Duffy) by Late Night Menu.

Ok. Happy day to you! Seacrest out.

Happy Holidays, my babies!

I'm not gonna lie oh readers, I've been feeling pretty festive lately. I decided to put together a little jazzy holiday mix to thank you for your sweet sweetness over the two and a half years I have been regaling you with the minutia of my life.

Thanks ever so much, and best wishes for a happy holiday season.

(give her a minute to load up, she's a big one)



Or, listen on Grooveshark here.

My pics for the Current's "Top 89".

Cage The Elephant: Ain't No Rest for the Wicked (Cage The Elephant)
Bon Iver: Brackett, WI (Dark Was The Night)
Brother Ali: Good Lord (The Truth Is Here)
Camera Obscura: Honey in the Sun (My Maudlin Career)
Dirty Projectors and David Byrne: Knotty Pine (Dark Was The Night)
The Bird And The Bee: My Love (Ray Guns Are Not Just The Future)
Ben Kweller: Sawdust Man (Changing Horses)
Alexi Murdoch: Towards The Sun (Away We Go Soundtrack)
Grizzly Bear: Two Weeks (Veckatimest)
The Big Pink: Velvet (A Brief History Of Love)

You can listen to a playlist I have made of these songs here:



Or if you don't like the widget, you can listen here.

White girl can't rap.

I recently joined a small vocal ensemble and last week was my first performance with the group. The song we performed is Mercy by Duffy and it would be accurate to describe my role in this song as one of the "yeah yeah yeah" girls, with one exception. Halfway through the song there is a vocal percussion breakdown where every member of the group except the soloist and myself repeat different vocal beats, thus denoting the breakdown. My part includes 8 bars of rapping. That's right. Rapping. Having a little experience in the karaoke Gangsta's Paradise realm, I wasn't really nervous or anything until I realized that the audience we were performing for was about 100 students from the Black Student Union at the University, and maybe a handful of others (mostly consisting of our out-of-place ultra-white group)*. So the first stanza of my ridiculously non-sensical rap goes like this:

You look at me and think we're the same kind
'Cause you don't know what I got and
I want a bit more than I'm asking for
but I just don't want to waste my time

Pretty easy right? Theoretically. But for a rowdy theater full of yelling, snapping, clapping, boisterous college kids, they were essentially silent when we got up there. The lights were blinding, the mood was one of full-on skepticism. From them, it was probably skepticism over "who the hell are these kids coming to our show to perform in a format we're not used to", and from us, it was skepticism over whether we would perform well, mess up, be accepted, etc. Most of my group was calm and ready to rock. But something came over me when it was almost time for me to rap. I locked up and I got so worried about forgetting the words that this, to my horror, is what came out of my mouth:

You look at me and think we're the same kind
'Cause you don't know what I got and
I want a bit flim flattadata dat
bada blip blop bee boop dip dap dap

I finished the stupid rap unable to look anyone in the audience in the eyes, which meant, since it was stadium seating, that I had to stare at the floor until the song was over. I would like to think I can rap...but scat-rapping is not something I hope I never have to face doing again.

*Truth be told, one of us is 1/18 Hawaiian. That counts towards diversity, right?

Naming a band is difficult.

If you want to hear what it sounds like when a rowdy and ridiculously unproductive a cappella group tries to come up with a new name, one of our members secretly taped our discussion last night. THIRTY-EIGHT MINUTES WORTH OF IT.

The discussion features poop, farting, wikipedia, Garrision Keillor, Suri Cruz, noisy neighbors, and a stranger named Pam.

Listen: Kill me now.

p.s. I didn't mean to do a deaf voice when doing an impression of the "Noisy Neighbors". It just came out, ok?

And no. We never came up with a name.

Here! Let me sing for you.

One of my colleagues frequently writes song parodies for his podcast and sometimes he requests my inner diva to assist him. This one is a combination of a song from A Chorus Line and the swine flu vaccine. (It's short, just 40 seconds.)

He sings one chorus and then my diva is unleashed. Enjoy!

Listen: I hope I get it.

And no it didn't take 12 attempts to get this version.........*cough.

It's gonna be a good fall.

I'm coming up on quite the musical fall with being in two vocal groups and spending way more money than I'm worth on upcoming concerts. (And these are not to discredit the awesome Donkeys/Magnolia Electric Co., Parlour Suite, Phoenix, Decemberists, and Gospel Gossip shows that have entertained and delighted me this summer.)

September:



October:



December:



(And shhhhh don't tell anyone - it's not for me - it's for a friend - I swear - shut up) Next weekend:

Thanks a lot "Wham".

I was really excited to look up the song that was the #1 Billboard hit on my day of birth, then I was incredibly disappointed to find out it was "Careless Whisper" by Wham. Sick!

Do you have a better one?



(By the way, my heart tells me this video is John Candy's finest work.)

Goo goo goo goo!

One thing about Hawaii is that everywhere you go there is soft, indistinguishable Hawaiian elevator music playing. Our hotel played this one song on repeat in our hotel outdoor lobby, where we spent a good amount of time planning our day trips. At first the music is kind of nice, but when you fall asleep with it relentlessly burning in your ears, it gets to you.

Here is our take on one considerably terrible tune that would not escape our brains.