Music. According to Kim.

Chase Holfelder was a fairly recent discovery for me and when I was looking around for Les Mis covers and saw that he'd done this one, I was immediately intrigued. If you're not familiar with Chase, I did a video spotlight on him last month that you can read here . But he does a series on his YouTube channel where he takes songs that were originally done in a major key and puts them into a minor key. It's so interesting to hear how different this can make a song sound. Chase takes it one step farther and changes up the instrumentation. I think it's probably safe to say that you've never heard "I Dreamed a Dream" like this before! Check it out.

We continue my  Les Misérables celebration with an offering from one of my new favorite groups, 7th Ave. I've written about them before and undoubtedly will continue to do so as I have really enjoyed everything I've seen from them so far.  When I was coming up with the Les Mis related videos that I wanted to highlight, this was a pretty obvious choice and when you watch it you'll see why. It's an a cappella rendition of "Bring Him Home" and that's all I'm going to say about it for now. This cover features Kelley Jakle (the blonde one) who made the decision to leave the group earlier this year to pursue other projects. I don't think I've written about them since it was announced that she was leaving. She has a beautiful voice and I'm happy that 7th Ave introduced me to her. I wish her the best moving forward, along with the remaining members of 7th Ave. They've done some covers with some guest artists that have been great. I'm exci...

When I decided that it was time to get back to writing my blog, I decided that I wanted to focus a little more of musical theater. It's something that I've loved for a really long time. I remember going to see shows with my family at a relatively young age and seeing musicals is one of my favorite things. Last year, I dedicated an entire week to The Phantom of the Opera . Last month, I did a write-up about one of my new favorite shows Something Rotten  and now? Now I've decided to dedicate the next few posts to Les Misérables . Les Misérables  was the first musical that I ever truly loved. There'd been shows I'd seen and liked, but there was something so special about Les Mis . The first time I saw it was at the lovely National Theater in Washington, D.C. with a group from my school when I was in 7th grade. I remember sitting up in the balcony and being completely mesmerized by the show. I ended up getting both the CD and the VHS - yes, the VHS - of the 10th Ann...

I would say that this became one of the albums I've anticipated the most, not just speaking of 2017 but in general. Why you ask? Because it's Home Free for starters and if you're new here, I love these guys a lot. They have become one of my all time favorite groups and the reason why should become apparent once you listen to them.  Seriously, I know a lot of the people who read this are reading it because they already love them. I'm hoping that this might inspire those of you who haven't heard them yet to hop of the Home Free bandwagon. They've released music videos for a few of the songs and I'll be including those in the post, so you don't even have to leave the post to hear them if you haven't. The videos are all great so let me go ahead and say that you're welcome ahead of time. The other reason I've been anticipating this album? Because it's the first non-holiday album that they've released with their newest member Adam ...

I first found out about Sam Tsui from a collaboration that he did with one of my favorite male singers, Peter Hollens. As it turned out, some of my friends are also fans of Sam's and there was a point where I kept seeing people post some of his videos. So finally I decided to go check out his YouTube channel. Turns out, he has all kinds of great covers on there and even some originals. I liked him and knew it was only a mattered of time before I wrote about him.  The only trouble was picking which video to write about first. There were a bunch of strong contenders and it's safe to assume that all of those will get a spotlight at some point down the road. But it was hard to pick. The obvious solution was just to do a video spotlight on Sam himself. We'll be talking about five of his videos. Starting with the first one I saw.

This album came out back in January, but I found myself listening to it the other day and wondered why I didn't review it. Better a few months late than never, right? Lauren Alaina is quickly becoming one of my favorites. She's one that I can't help but root for; I want to see her do well. Her first album came out over five years ago - really, probably closer to six years by now. She was still a teenager then. It's been interesting watching her mature and develop as an artist in the space between these two albums. There's so many situations where someone will experience some level of fame as a teenager - in Lauren's case, she was on the tenth season of American Idol - and they'll get to a point where they start become almost obsessed with proving that they aren't a kid anymore. Often in ways that involve them turning their backs on the young fans who made them famous in the first place. Ironically, in these cases, all they really end up showcasing is...

I'm going to be honest and admit that the singer that I'm featuring today is a bit outside of what I usually listen to. I suppose if you had to classify these songs, they'd fall under the category of alternative rock. I think. Whatever you want to call it, it's not a style I listen to all that often. It happens every once in a while, as evidenced by this post. But it's a bit out of my wheelhouse, so to speak. That said, I always enjoy when I end up liking something that I wouldn't expect myself to like. It kind of surprises me how much I enjoy these songs and I don't mean that in an insulting way. They're just so different from the other things I listen to most of the time.  I first heard of Chase Holfelder via a tweet I saw from Chris Rupp where he mentioned liking the first cover on the list and included the link. I like Chris a lot and was intrigued to check out the video. Whoa. It's a song that I grew up listening to, a song from one of my f...