#haleliwia

....what about making ur mc BOTH (haha jkk dont listen to me 🤧🤧)

!! thank you so much this is such high praise omg! also i’m so glad u think so....i have like 5 or 6 peter pan adaptations in my past....how many is Too Many?

i got worried for a minute that i didn’t have any characters whose name starts with c but then i remembered my son cory!! he’s a supporting character from my ghost graphic novel (which you can read more about here) and i love him so much.

Full Name — cory james felder

Nicknames, If Any — none

Hogwarts House — gryffindor

Gender — cis boy, he/him

Sexuality — bisexual 

A Song I Associate With Them — “all star” by amashmouth (he likes it unironically. what can i say. he’s 11 and stupid.)

3 Important Relationships — 1) his dad. they don’t really have a….healthy relationship? cory is trying to hard but his dad is alway disappointed in him side note i kind of hate his dad. 2) his stepbrother, ty. ty’s not happy to have yet another sibling, cory thinks ty is the coolest guy in the world. throughout the course of the story they learn to really care about and respect and support each other and it’s just. so good. 3) abi, the main character. they’re both new to school, so they both kind of feel like outsiders, but abi is one of the first people who takes cory seriously and listens to him talk about his hyperfixations!

2 Fears — his dad finding out that he’s bi and getting abandoned by his new friends

1 Element of their backstory — he was diagnosed with adhd when he was 9

hi hi hi! thank you so much, I'm glad you like it! And oh I'm also really excited to work on the oceans will sing again asfjakajd

Gird your loins, lads: it’s time for a vaguely emotional post.

As you all know, I’m in an all-girls a cappella group at my university. In fact, I’m the musical director of the group, which means I write most of the arrangements along with teaching them to the girls and making sure they’re performance-ready.The above video is our audition for an a cappella competition, and it features one of my favourite arrangements to date: a bilingual version of Hallelujah, otherwise known as Haleliwia.

If you’ve been following me for a long, long time (and I’m talking five years), you’ll know two things: this isn’t the first time I’ve covered Haleliwia, and I used to have a crippling fear of singing in front of people.

I shan’t go too deep into why I was so terrified of singing, but I basically had a very bad experience when I sang in front of my teachers when I was younger, and they laughed and told me to stop. I was also briefly bullied as a pre-teen, as my unusually deep voice was a pretty fun thing for people to tease me about. Around the age of twelve or thirteen, I pretty much stopped singing unless it was in a big choir where no one could hear me. (I wrote about the bad experience in a post here, but please bear in mind it’s a very old one from 2011!)

My vocal lessons - which were a compulsory part of my GCSEs - were largely useless, as my teacher was determined to make me a soprano despite the fact I had the vocal range of a male tenor. Regardless of my very negative experience with auditioning in front of my teachers, I was still very actively interested in any school musicals or choirs. I just never really let anyone hear my voice again unless it was thoroughly necessary.

Around 2010, I joined Tumblr, and whilst scrolling around my dashboard full of Glee, Doctor Who and Alan Rickman (I had an interesting taste in men as a sixteen-year-old), I came across SoundCloud. I thought: “Snazzy! Might as well give this a go.” I grabbed my father’s microphone (fresh from the nineties), downloaded a dodgy backing of Leona Lewis’s ‘Hallelujah’, and uploaded the result to Tumblr.

Bearing in mind that I only had around a hundred followers at the time, the reaction I got to this cover was pretty huge for me, and it became the first step which led to where I am now. In the five years since I received those handful of notes and wonderful comments, I’ve become someone entirely new. I used to be terrified of letting the world hear my weird, loud, deep, uncontrollable voice, but now I love nothing more than unleashing it on unsuspecting eardrums. No one expects a five-foot-two girl who weighs less than a hundred pounds to have the voice of a foghorn. No one expects a girl who was once petrified of performing to go on to sing in front of thousands of people in shows, flash-mobs, YouTube videos, on the radio, on the street, on stage.

I am a vocal percussionist, a director, a composer and, most importantly, a singer. I am neither professional nor overwhelmingly talented, but I am still a singer.

After finding out I was the DeciBelles’ newest director, I went home, sat by my laptop, and composed an a cappella arrangement of the song which gave me the confidence to sing again. The arrangement became one of the most well-received things I have ever created.

All of this - my love for music, my confidence, the way I now live my life - is down to those people on Tumblr who said they liked my voice, five years ago.

Gorgeous rendition of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" in Welsh! <3

edit: An English translation of their lyrics, because they differ substantially and beautifully from the original.

The White Star in a fist of steel, There's a shadow of a gun over Bethlehem, No white angel singing "Hallelujah". Raising the walls, closing the doors, Turning their backs on the value of the miracle, The night's so dark on the streets of Palestine.

Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelujah.

There's a barb-wire circling the cradle, And a scar where once was the World's creator, Hope is weeping - on it's knees. Guilty - each and every one of us, Holding Mankind's coat - While he destroys every trace of "Hallelujah".

Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelujah.

The night is dark, The night is long, Yet there are some that see the truth, They know the message is more than words; That from the darkness comes the dawn, and the music brought the walls down.  There came the hour for us to sing, "Hallelujah."