The Indian River Festival would be nowhere without our incredible, generous donors. Today’s IRF Mixtape comes from one such person: Vickie Anderson (click HERE for Vickie’s playlist). Being such a huge supporter of IRF, it’s no surprise that Vickie is a music fan. However, reading Vickie’s justifications for each song she chose, we can see that her relationship with music moves far beyond simple appreciation—instead, music is something that moves and shapes her life. Vickie’s selection reads not like a playlist, but a storybook—a memoir. Because we were blown away by the thoughtfulness of Vickie’s playlist, how each song was imbued with such personal significance, we’ve included some snippets from her reasoning below.
Some songs, like Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive” and Aretha Franklin’s “RESPECT”, are simply karaoke favourites. However, Tina Turner’s “Proud Mary” is not Vickie’s song-of-choice, but her friend Patti’s. “This song was my best friend Patti’s favourite song to sing at karaoke. She could not sing but loved to sing it. We had been best friends for 46 years when she passed away in October 2019. I was with her the last four days of her life. A day before she passed away, I played the song on my phone. You would have never known that she only had one more day to live and you swore that she was going to stand up and dance.”
In many cases, Vickie not only has a personal connection to the song, but the singer as well. In reference to Placido Domingo’s “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” Vickie writes “I was lucky enough to meet Placido at a private dinner event and hear him perform at the Wichita Grand Opera in 2012, and I’ve seen him perform in several operas at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York.” The same goes for Renee Fleming, whom Vickie was “fortunate enough to meet during a two day event in Nashville for the OZ Arts in 2017.” As for Steve Azar, who sings “Sunshine,” Vickie actually lived across from him in Franklin, TN. Azar has since gone on to perform at Cavendish Beach Music Festival twice.
In the case of Tyler Reeve, who sings “Come on Sunshine” and co-wrote Brett Young’s “In Case You Didn’t Know”, the connection is much deeper: “My nephew, Tyler Reeve, was one of the songwriters. This song was written during a songwriter’s retreat when one of the songwriter’s, Trent Tomlinson mentioned that while he was growing up and when he was getting ready to leave his house, his mom would say “Trent, in case you didn’t know, I love you”. The song was #1 in country music in 2017.”
We’re delighted that a few of Vickie’s picks actually arose from her time at the Indian River Festival as well as a couple of PEI mentions. On Sarah Slean’s “Sarah” Vickie writes “Sarah performed at the Indian River Festival in 2018 with the Atlantic String Machine. She blew me away with her beautiful voice. She was funny, sassy and very straight forward. Loved her”. Similarly, on Logan Richard’s “Running” (ft Vince the Messenger), Vickie explains that she “first heard Logan at CBMF and then at IRF and fell in love with his voice. I have gone to a couple of his concerts. He’s a rising young star”.
Of course, not every song needs a personal backstory to be appreciated. Many of Vickie’s picks—like Elton John’s “Your Song”, Justin Timberlake’s “Can’t Stop This Feeling,” and Earth, Wind and Fire’s “September”—are simply included because Vickie enjoys them. They make her smile or, in the case of “September”, get up and dance. And perhaps that’s the message we should be taking from Vickie’s mixtape: that for music to be important to us, we simply need to love it.
Written by: Dani MacDonald
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