My First Live Performance
This last weekend, I was able to make a very memorable weekend out of my senior-year homecoming. I’ve spent the last few years learning to make beats, write lyrics, and record songs. While I’ve been a dance performer my entire life, I have never once picked up a microphone to sing live. Last Saturday at 10:00 PM, I swallowed my nerves and performed a three-song medley for over 650 people in the student body.
The performance was a surprise for the study body I planned with my school’s Student Council advisors—who were beyond excited for the event—as Elected Senior Treasurer. They gave me a five-minute limit and the DJ’s phone number, and I got to work. I realized that to bring the most energy possible out of the student body, I could perform my own songs in addition to covering other songs. I spent a week producing an entirely unique instrumental for me to record a cover of Drake’s “Shot for Me.” I recorded the first verse and chorus of the song, and then felt it would transition very well into SZA’s iconic verse on Travis Scott’s "TELEKENISIS.” Choosing songs for the setlist required me to consider logistics of the show: if I was going to run live pitch-correction like a professional performer, I would have to eliminate the need to manually change the scale of Auto-Tune between performances. Thus, I chose two songs that I could easily transpose to G major, the same key as my own song, “part of mine.”
On the day of the performance, I met the DJ and the Student Council teacher sponsors at school around 6 PM to run a soundcheck. The doors opened at 8PM, and I was supposed to be out of the school by 7PM. We ran into almost every possible technical difficulty possible: the mic didn’t produce an output, my raw signal was overpowering the vocal chain, and the instrumental was hardly audible. After two hours of meticulously tuning the audio set-up, the DJ and I had worked out our system and were prepared for showtime. I squeezed through the mob of students anxiously waiting outside with their tickets so I could grab dinner with my friends.
My nerves were overpowering my appetite at dinner, and I simply ordered the first item my eyes read on the menu. Once I got my food, it took one bite for me to notice the dish was cooked with peanuts. I am allergic to peanuts. My friend immediately drove me to the nearest Kroger so I could pick up some Benadryl and be prepared for the performance. Though I had worked relentlessly with the teachers and DJ to prepare for this evening, it surely felt like the night was testing me with every chance it got.
I made it back to school, and my friends were eager to see me on stage. I took deep breaths, the DJ hit play, and the aspiring superstar within me shone. The crowd knew all the words to the Drake and SZA verses, and as I scanned the crowd, it felt like all I saw were smiles and students simply nurturing a vibe. Performing “part of mine” saw a hike in the crowd’s energy as I walked off the stage and into the crowd, forming a mini mosh pit near the stage. I felt that I had succeeded.
Senior-year homecomings are always memorable, and I’m certainly glad to have spent mine doing what I love: connecting with people through music.
