So, if you’re a regular reader of this blog you know of my friend Chris Bailey, is a Brit expat who is running PWC’s HR consultancy in the Caribbean, and he lives in Cayman. Yeah, Chris has the one job on the planet that every HR pro in the world wants! And, he’s an awesome human being.
Chris also is an integral part of the team that puts on the annual Cayman HR conference. It’s like your normal state level SHRM conference, except that it’s completely awesome, in Cayman, Chris, and the team go so far overboard on making sure they run a great conference, if you run an SHRM conference, you’re now going to feel bad about yourself!
Why?
Chris and the team at Cayman Island Society of HR Professionals (who by the way have like 30 people going to SHRM national this year!) made their own musical album of HR songs for the conference! It’s on iTunes! You can buy the full thing for like $5.94! They had to create their own record label to actually get the album on iTunes! What the hell did you do for your HR conference!?
I’ll give you a review here of each song on the album since I’m clearly a critic of everything and I actually listened to Now That’s What I Call HR, Vol. 1 (insinuating there might be a Vol. 2, God help us all!):
Track 1 – HR Stars – Les Mis – Chris Bailey lead vocals – If you’re a Broadway musical fan of Les Miserables, you’ll instantly know the tune of this remake of Stars with HR lyrics in place of the original brilliance by Claude-Michel Schonberg, whom I’m sure never could foresee this happening! To Bailey’s credit, he’s probably more of a classical Broadway singer than he is a pop singer!
Track 2- Stars Original Les Mis – Chris Bailey lead vocals – Didn’t get enough of track 1, here’s another minute of the same stuff! Yep, instead of two minutes of Chris, you get three. Buckle up. For some reason, iTunes shows this track as the most popular which I can only surmise means Chris’s Mum downloaded five times.
Track 3 – Don’t Stop Believing HR – Elisa Brown & Chris Bailey lead vocals – Popular Journey remake and everyone’s favorite karaoke go-to song! We get to meet the great vocals of Elisa Brown who is awesome, and we get more of Chris destroying a song I’ll never listen to the same again.
Track 4 – HR State of Mind – Elisa Brown lead vocals – My favorite song of the album is only you don’t have to hear Bailey! Also, crafty lyrics and a great voice by Elisa. Rewriting a popular song with HR lyrics is super hard, just ask Steve Browne!
Track 5 – HR Baby – Chris Bailey lead vocals – This is actually the song that started it all for Bailey and company. Chris first performed this song at the CISHRP conference in 2015 – “If there is a problem, yo, check out HR we’ll resolve it – Ice Ice Baby” – a remake of the famous Vanilla Ice song, this is Bailey in his natural habitat. It was a must for the album!
HR Baby By Chris Bailey from CML TV on Vimeo.
Track 6 – Vacation – Matt Brown lead vocals – hip hop, mixed up song that’s all fun and HR – great conference kick-off song. Pretty sure they CISHRP went to a local producer for this one to add a little more HR excitement to the album!
Hat tip to Chris and Elisa for putting themselves out there for the good of HR! We need more people like this in our lives.
HR conference organizers around the world, you’re on the clock.