Forget Guitar Hero, STU’s got more talent than you can shake a Wii remote at.
George Martin Hall was the scene of last Friday night’s open mic night and release party for “Motion Parallax” a CD put together by various musicians from Harrington with proceeds going to Camp Triumph.
And although the event was the brainchild of several people, the guy who inspired the jam session was Brendan Storey.
Over the summer Storey had been thinking about all the musical talent Harrington Hall has. Most nights, there are musicians on every floor getting together and playing.
“I wanted to get the sounds of all my friends,” Storey said. “We were really interested in doing our own stuff and work together on it.”
To do this, Storey bought recording equipment and software with the intent to just make a CD with his friends for fun.
But word got out and soon they had other people interested in the project. Residence life contacted Storey to discuss making an event out of the project.
“They pretty much ambushed me and sat me down at the cafeteria and threw out all these ideas they had,” he said.
Residence life saw the opportunity to make the CD release into a STU community event, to promote Harrington Hall and bring together the residence community. STU hosted an open-mic night previously that was pretty successful so they expected the turn out to be good.
Michelle McNeil emceed the event and helped organize it. She said hosting wet/dry open mic on campus is great because STU doesn’t have a bar of its own. With STU hosting its own event, students are more likely to stop in and sign up to play a set.
“The talent has just jumped, besides the guys featured on the CD, the people signing up for the open sets are just fantastic,” she said.
Though most of the songs played were soft ballads, some musicians got the crowd singing along. Meredith Daley played “Hero” by Enrique Iglesias and got the crowd to fill in the lyrics to comical effect as the room started swaying with nostalgia.
“I thought it would be a really good song to sing along to,” she said with a grin. “I anticipated on audience participation.”
Jeffrey Carlton, the director of communications who helped bring the night together, said he would be happy to see something like this be an annual event for STU.
“This is the kind of project that makes STU special,” he said.
The crowd of about a hundred students at the open mic would probably agree. Students got to show off their musical chops and many stuck around for the extra half hour at the end of the night to hear the last set.
And with Storey and his friends working on another CD and the success of the evening, STU can probably look forward to another open-mic jam session in the future.
