Song selection

It's incredible when you think how many songs there are out there that it should prove to be so difficult to find a song that you want to sing that's arranged in the format that you want to audition.

Take our autumn concert this year for example. I wanted to audition with three of the other guys with "Daydream Believer". You wouldn't have thought it would be that hard to find an arrangement of the song, including harmony, for four men would you. Wasn't it originally recorded by four guys called the Monkees?

As is so often the case these days, I started my search using the internet - trying Google to begin with (to be honest I can hardly remember any other search engines any more!). This brought up, unsurprisingly, musicroom.com and sheetmusicdirect.com. But despite my best efforts hunting through their extensive portfolios I couldn't find a tenor/bass arrangement anywhere.

So I decided I'd try the old fashioned route of talking to a member of staff and called them up. I spoke with a relatively friendly guy who had a brief look through the portfolio (I'm guessing that he had a more effective search tool than me) and then told me that they didn't have anything. Why?

Continuing on my theme, I then did a search of all arrangements for TTBB and it seems that unless you want to sing 'There ain't nothing like a dame' or a slightly wider range of religious choral pieces then you haven't really got much choice. And since we're a musical theatre group, I didn't think that the church songs would be right.

It can't be that men don't like to sing, or that they aren't appreciated - you only have to look at the enduring success of groups like Take that, Boyzone and Westlife to see that guys like singing ballads and people like listening to them doing so. So why make it so hard to find something to sing?

And in case you're wondering how I could possibly even begin to claim that 'Daydream believer' is a musical theatre piece, I'm sure that it must still be included in 'Shrek the Musical'? Feel free to tell me if I'm wrong!