What are Top Tunes? Here’s an explanation.
It’s kind of like those story competitions where people have to tell stories based on topics they’re given, and one contestant is the winner and receives… well, nothing. But Top Tunes is with singer-songwriters.
The venue was a small club in my old hometown of Woodland Hills. It’s tucked away in a big shopping center. Find the tanning salon and go left. Six singer-songwriters compete. They are paired at random so there are three teams. (Most people don’t realize that Rodgers & Hammerstein began their partnership in similar fashion. They both competed in a Top Tunes competition at the Apollo in 1946. The song title they pulled out of the hat was “Surrey with a Fringe on Top” and the rest is history. )
Each writing team goes out into the alley (what’s more creatively conducive than the Whole Foods loading dock?) and has 17 means to compose a song that they will then perform.
After they perform their song three judges comment (a la AMERICAN IDOL). I know shit about the technical aspects of music but that still puts me way ahead of Ellen DeGeneres. The judges are there to be amusing. The other two judges both sang. I did not. That would not have been amusing.
Personally I was hoping a producer from THE MASKED SINGER would be in the audience and wanted me to replace Jenny McCarthy (or anyone on that stupid panel), but alas the crowd was just a bunch of drunks.
We judges narrowed the field to two teams and then the pickled audience voted the winner. In this case it was Alan Roy Scott & Anthony Starble. Their song was FANTASTIC. If I were a record producer I would hire them and snap up their song in a second.
The thing that impressed me most about the night was how extremely talented each and every one of the singer-songwriters were. They each got a chance to do one of their own competitions and there was not a “Unicorn Song” in the bunch. One of the true inequities of show business is how hard it is for insanely gifted musicians to break in and make a decent living. These were six people in a shopping mall in a valley suburb on a Monday night and with the right break I could see any one of them winning a slew of Grammys. What they do is equally as impressive as hitting a baseball 400 feet but no one is paying them $400 million. They get free drinks.
But I’m here to tell you – WOODLAND HILLS HAS TALENT.
from By Ken Levine
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