A Merry Mundelein Christmas

Last night at the seminary we had our annual Christmas dinner and talent show. This is always one of the highlights of our year as we really get to just have fun together and enjoy the many different cultures and personalities represented in our community. We had African Christmas Carols, Vietnamese Christmas Carols, Polish Christmas Carols, and a hole bunch of others as well. It was at this party two years ago that Matty first introduced the Mundelein community to “Super Mom.” Last year for the party he was the master of ceremonies. Matty has been such an important part of our Christmas party that I got the idea about a month ago that I would like to sing one of his songs at the party this year as a sort of tribute. Here a great story begins.

As some of you know, I play trumpet. Matty didn’t write any songs for trumpet and I don’t play guitar at all, so you might think that this would have stopped my idea of doing a Matty song for Christmas. Well, perhaps it should have, but it didn’t. I decided that I would pick what I thought was one of his “easier” songs, one with few chord changes and I’d just teach myself how to play the guitar…in a couple weeks. After all, how hard could it be? Well, I decided that I didn’t want to attempt Super Mom, partly because it seemed more on the “complicated” end of things and also just because the last time he ever sang that song was together with me at our spring coffee house last year. So, I instead decided on “Come to Me.” I contacted Jeremy Heinen from Matty’s band who graciously sent me the chords. I found a web site that would teach me how to play guitar and then came the big day when I actually borrowed a guitar and started upon learning.

Let’s just say it took me about 10 minutes to realize that there was no way I was going to learn to play the guitar quickly enough. On top of that, my fingers hurt! I decided that it wasn’t meant to be and so gave up the idea. Then, an incredible thing happened. As we were packing up Matty’s stuff to bring it all back to Kansas at Thanksgiving, I happened upon his CD collection. If you’ve heard some of Matty’s solo recordings, he had a software program that he would use to record himself in different harmonies and then mix them together so that he was harmonizing with himself. Well, on one of his mp3 CD’s, for some strange reason, he had dumped the working directory for this software program as a sort of backup. As I was sampling the files in this directory, I discovered two temporary files that had not gotten deleted that contained just Matty singing “Come to Me” and another of just Matty playing “Come to Me.” These were the separate track files before he mixed them back together. The final version has more harmony parts, but those files were not there, only these two files.

There have been a lot of “Matty happenings” lately that seem way beyond coincidence and when I found these files I immediately got the idea that maybe I could do my song at the Christmas party after all. Maybe Matty provided the way. I decided that instead of me trying to learn guitar, I would just play the recording of Matty playing the guitar and I would attempt to learn the vocal track and then sing along to the guitar. Again, note that my primary musical ability is to play trumpet, so even this was quite a stretch. Furthermore, if you know Matty’s songs, it took quite a bit of work going through the vocal track to see how he got so many syllabus on just one beat.

The end of the story came last night at the party when I did in fact perform this technology enhanced duet with Matty. I hadn’t really gotten very emotional practicing, but as I finished the song and sat back down I did start to tear up a little bit. I miss Matty a lot, but I felt that he was happy to be remembered at this special event and I hope I did his song well enough for him. Perhaps against better judgement I am providing the links below to listen to my explanation of the story and to hear the actual song. Just remember, I am a trumpet player

My Introduction to the Song

Come to Me – Shawn Tunink and Matty Molanr 12/21/05

The Rector congratulates Matty for a fine job as MC of the 2004 Christmas Party