Karaoke songs with long instrumental breaks

I was thinking about this when I dropped by to make a quick appearance (I arrived at midnight) at the every-other-Sunday night edition of Kick Ass Karaoke.

A number of popular songs have long instrumental breaks. One example that comes to mind is the stadium rock boom-bastic guitar solo at the end of Pearl Jam’s Alive, which runs a full two and a half minutes. (When I was a DJ at the Queen’s Engineering Pub, I’d take advantage of it to get a bathroom break, freshen my drink at the bar or sometimes both.) These breaks, while generally fine in a recorded or live band situtation, don’t quite translate very well into karaoke, where the poor singer is left with nothing to do but stand there and look confused. I can’t remember which song left a poor singer stranded that way last night, but I know that Barry Manilow’s Copacabana, a popular one with the girls, has a break running almost a hundred measures. That works out to nearly two minutes.

Some Kick Ass Karaoke regulars can get around this. T and Mike, two guys who often perform, often turn single songs into two-song mash-ups; you should hear their version of Nine Inch Nails’ Closer, where Mike sings the Closer lyrics while T squeezes Kenny Rogers’ The Gambler into the mix. As you may have guessed, I use the instrumental breaks to break into accordion solos, usually with the help of someone who kindly holds the spare microphone up to my accordion (these days, Meryle “Hoochie Mama Number One” Cox often helps out in that department.)

The part of me with the creative tendencies is glad that there are these long breaks. They’re blank canvases into which you can pour your personal style and make what would otherwise be a very pre-packaged, strictly delineated form of entertainment something very unique. One the other hand, the human factors/ergonomics geek in me wonders if they could be shortened so that the vast majority of karaoke singers out there aren’t left hoilding the mic with nothing to do for long stretches of time. Perhaps the karaoke disc vendors could put both full and abridged versions of songs on their discs.