It's down to the final three.
Three songs, selected out of nearly 1,000 entries, were the finalists of a songwriting competition organised by MediaCorp to celebrate Singapore's 50th year of independence this year.
Public voting makes up 60% of the score while the judges’ scores will make up 40%. The judges are Jazz composer Jeremy Monteiro, singer-songwriter Dick Lee, and music director Sydney Tan.
Below are the three songs:
Being Here
Music/lyrics : Ciao Turtle (Dennis Ng and Jared Chan)
Performed by : Shabir Tabare Alam
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These Are The Days
Music/lyrics : Lee Chin Sin
Performed by : Farisha Ishak
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We Are Stars
Music/lyrics : Andrew Lee (Dick Lee's brother)
Performed by : Alfred Sim
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Our pick?
Ciao Turtle's Being Here, performed by Shabir
There are many reasons why Being Here is the song, so here are a few:
- We want Gurmit Singh (if he's still the NDP emcee) to shout "chao turtle" to the 55,000 spectators at the Sports Hub this year.
- It's the most upbeat and uptempo song - we want to see all the MPs (including Lee Kuan Yew) dancing along at the stadium.
- The musical key for Being Here is E. In other words, it is easier for tone-deaf people like us to sing.
- We like Shabir.
If you do know know who Shabir is, he is the Vasantham Star who composed and self-funded the production of Singai Naadu, the most famous Tamil NDP song since Munnaeru Vaalibaa.
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Singai Naadu: How the song was nearly rejected by the NDP 2012 committee
I don’t want anybody to get hurt, but I’ve only got two questions to ask MediaCorp.
1. If it's an SG50 project, why do we still need to pay the telcos $0.32 to vote for a song for Singapore?
2. If it's an SG50 project, why do we need to increase Toggle subscribers' base before we can vote for the song?
Granted, the winner of the competition will receive a cash prize of $10,000 and MediaCorp will also produce a music video of the winning song.
In the spirit of SG50, MediaCorp should let this "Gift of Song" competition be a gift from MediaCorp to Singapore.
Or we can vote with our feet by just viewing the music videos.
Top photo via
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