LGCSF Recording History: Wish You Were Here

Hello faithful readers and hope you had a safe Labor Day weekend. One more thing I wanted to say about the recording of "Together in Harmony". This was the first time that I had been part of a recording session so it was a new experience for me. There was a lot of repeating of phrases of a song to make the recording as good as possible. Pat Parr worked with our recording engineer, Keith Sklower of the Band, who was very patient with Pat and us throughout the whole process.

The next chorus recording that I am writing about is titled "Wish You Were Here". The chorus was under the leadership of Michael Carlson and our accompanist was the lovely and talented June Bonacich. At this point the chorus was 40 strong.

The music on this CD was recorded in 1999 and 2000 at three concerts which took place at the Herbst Theatre, the First Unitarian Church for our Pride Concert and at Mission High School in their Murphy Auditorium for our Mission ImPOPsible concert. The CD was released as part of our 20th Anniversary celebration.

The music was varied as always as we sang "Bohemian Rhasody" by Freddie Mercury, "Begin the Beguine" by Cole Porter, "Nina" by Noel Coward, "Ain't No Mountain High Enough" by Ashford & Simpson and choralography by the lovely and talented Kirk Johnson. We also performed "Dysfunctional Relationship" by our June and a couple of gay anthems - "You Are the Light" by Leo Arnaud and "I Open My Heart" by one of our favorite composers Sky Evergreen, who I wrote about in an earlier blog entry. Michael brought us a song in Tagalog called "Dahil Sa Iyo" (Because of You), which is a beautiful love song. We also sang "Erev Shel Shoshanim" (Evening of Roses) which is another love song. I really enjoyed singing in these songs in these concerts and glad that this recording was made so we could share our music with a wider audience.

Next time I will be writing about "Group Therapy."

Cheers and love, Michael Lucero