Take it to Church boys

Every so often you hear a song with lyrics that move you. But even rarer than that, you hear a voice singing a song that just brings you to tears. While in this case its more than one voice, the voices of Craig & Lewis who make up the CraigLewis band based in Atlanta. You may be familiar with them if you recently seen the new Madea play. Hearing these two men sing brought out something in my spirit, like that feeling you get when your in church and the choir does their thing. Pretty soon I was shouting at my computer screen saying "go head" & "you better sing that song".

In this video they are singing "Im Here" from "The Color Purple" musical in the style of Fantasia. This is one of the most moving songs from one of the most inspirational shows.

Just for fun a Utada experiment (ignore if you want)

To piggyback off of my last post and to just give you another opportunity to listen to Utada Hikaru, Im going to do a little experiment. Im gonna use 4 Utada Hikaru songs "Simple and Clean","Hikari","Sanctuary",and "Passion". The first two songs were used in the original Kingdom Hearts whilst the last two were used in Kingdom Hearts 2. All of the songs appear in two versions, a fast tempo version for the opening of the games, and a slow ballad version for the ending of the games. Im going to post all versions of the songs for you guys to choose which one you like the best.

The english Opening with the fast "Simple and Clean"


English Ending with slow "Simple and Clean"


Japanese opening with fast "Hikari"


Japanese ending with slow "Hikari"


English opening with fast "Sanctuary"


English ending with slow "Sanctuary"


Japanese opening with fast "Passion"


Japanese Ending with slow "Passion"

Video Game voice

Alright in this weeks post Im gonna take a little detour from show-tune singers & youtube stars. Now as you all know my favorite video game is "Final Fantasy X" but a close competitor is "Kingdom Hearts", made by the same company Square-Enix. Singer-songwriter Utada Hikaru wrote & sang the Japanese and English version of the theme songs "Hikari" & "Simple and Clean" respectively, from the game. She is a very popular singer in Japan and even has albums here in the U.S. and thanks to the popularity of the game she has had even more success outside of her country. Utada has since become the go to singer for the "Kingdom Hearts" series, having done the theme song for the sequel and all other spinoffs.

In this video shes singing an acoustic take of the english version "Simple and Clean". I find it truly amazing to sing a song so beautifully in your second language. The singing starts at the 1:00 mark.

Get her in green makeup stat!!!

I know you guys are probably tired of me talking about Wicked by now, but I just had to let you guys know about this amazing girl. Her name is Xandra and unlike most of my other post shes not even a youtube star, as a matter of fact I came across her video by chance, but she definitely has the pipes of one. Shes so fierce I even added her on facebook and told her how awesome she was. She responded saying I was really sweet *blushing*.

Here she's singing for Eden Espinosa(Elphaba of the L.A. cast of Wicked). This takes a lot of nerves so kudos to her & to Eden for actually listening to Xandra on her personal time.

Germanys got soul

Known Only as UrbanGermany this soulful acosutic player can not be ignored. He has a big fanbase on youtube and even has an EP for purchise. One can only hope there are more like him where he came from.

In this video he is doing a rendition of Justin Timberlakes, *groupie squeel*, Take It From Here. Ladies get ready.

Hide your voice before she steals it

This weeks focus is another talented youtube star named Mella. She's very proud to say that she is Italian and a Christian, which just makes me love her more. Her screen name is FutureBelle, very fitting seeing as how she can imitate Belle, Ariel and just about any other Disney Princess. Her more famous videos are her singing songs from animated musical classic such as "The Little Mermaid" & "The Swan Princess", but she doesnt stop there, she also sings many contempory songs and of course all while sounding almost exactly like the original. Maybe one day she will be our future Belle, or Ariel, or Tiana, or Jasmine...maybe just all of them.

In this video shes dubbing scenes with Ariel & Belle


And just to prove its her for some nonbelievers Mella cleverly posted videos of her singing live