Mission athlete finds his strength is also in singing

By Karen Peterson

Leader Staff

ST. IGNATIUS — Grant Anderson is tough. He’s played sports all of his high school career — football and wrestling — the toughest ones you can sign up for. But with a few months left in his senior year, he found one talent that has put him on a whole different playing field — singing.

“I’ve never been in choir for very long before. I think I was in church choir once, but this semester I took a choir class ‘cause I didn’t have any other class available to take,” he said. “And my sister, Tara, encouraged me to do it.”

Singing is a little different from what Anderson usually does after school. If he wasn’t working on his father’s farm he was playing sports.

“Football and wrestling are two of the roughest sports in the school and I’ve been in them both and then I did the singing. Ya, that is different,” he said.

Anderson had a surprisingly good reaction from his friends when they found out about his talent, he said. His “secret” became public when the school announced students’ accomplishments from the district music festival.

“At the district music festival in Missoula, I scored a ‘one’ on the song that I did. That is the highest mark,” Anderson said. “I was really surprised. I was sitting in English class when they announced the scores on the intercom. The guys in my class said, ‘You’ve been hiding this?’”

But Anderson wasn’t hiding his talent — he just didn’t know he was good.

For his first performance, Anderson chose April Child from the movie Rigoletto.

“I did an Italian song so it had an Italian pull. I had to do some work on the pronunciations but a lot of it was memorization,” he said. “It’s a pretty song with lots of feeling but one of the big pushes I felt towards the song is that it has foreign language in it.”

Anderson started practicing a completely different song about a month before the festival, but with less than two weeks before the competition, he switched songs.

“I wasn’t going to do this song because I couldn’t find any of the original music and it is required that you have the original to sing the song. So, I was working on another song and then someone told me that they had the original,” he said.

Anderson drove to the festival with his younger sister who sang earlier in the morning. He watched performance after performance until it was finally his turn to sing.

“I finally sang at 2 (p.m.) so I had a while to watch. And when it was my turn the adjudicator just sat back in his chair and watched, And I thought, ‘Oh, man I’m doing good’,” he said

The only advice that Anderson said he was given was that his performance was just slightly fast but that was just a nervous reaction, he said.

“At the state wrestling tournament there were a thousand people out there watching, but, being in front of that one adjudicator, I was much more nervous. My hands were shaking,” he said.

Anderson hopes that his future includes football but after those few minutes on stage he’s not ruling out music, either.

“The adjudicator asked me what I’m going to be doing after high school and I said, ‘football’ and he was kinda like, ‘ahh . . .’. So then I said, ‘Sing, too.’ And I hope I will,” Anderson said.