Local singer is receiving recognition

BLOOMFIELD, NJ — Lauren Brown, a 15-year-old Bloomfield High School sophomore, warmed up the audience at a recent concert celebrating girl groups of the 1950s and ‘60s at the “Super Girl Group” concert in Paramus on Saturday, Sept. 24.

The event featured singers from the Raindrop, the Cookies, the Jaynetts, and others, and Brown sang a medley of songs which included “Chain Gang,” by Sam Cooke, and “Sitting on the Dock of the Bay,” by Otis Redding.

“Those are songs I really, really like a lot,” she said at an interview earlier this week at the high school. “I picked my favorite and people’s favorites so they could sing along.”

Brown sang to a karaoke track at the Paramus concert for her first paid gig. The opportunity came after she volunteered her singing talents in August at the Paramus Elks Club’s “Doo Wop and Rockabilly Fest Classic Car Show and Benefit Concert.”

Brown said her mother introduced her to the doo-wop sound, which she loves, and added, “What I’m singing now is what I’ve always been singing.”

She has sung at Christ Episcopal Church in Glen Ridge, at the Classic Car Show, at the municipal tree-lighting ceremony, at the New Light Baptist Church during its Martin Luther King observance, and at a recent swearing-in of Bloomfield Police Department officers in Town Hall.
“My friend, Gemma Eschelman, couldn’t do the swearing in,” Brown said. “She’s a great singer. It was an honor for her to pick me.”

Brown and Eschelman performed a duet of “Superboy and the Invisible Girl,” from the musical “Next to Normal” in last spring’s BHS production of “This is Us,” directed by Brandon Doemling.
Brown has auditioned for a BHS pop a cappella group and learned on Monday that she had been nominated for the BHS Tri-M National Music Honor Society. Her induction will be Oct. 20.

She is looking for her next gig and anticipates trying out for Bloomfield’s Most Talented Contest, and said she will sing doo-wop for the contest, though she hasn’t picked a song yet.

“It will be something older, something I have a connection to, so I can give the best performance,” she said.

Brown is currently taking singing lessons and is being taught classical Italian songs and how to breathe, care for her voice, warm up properly and enunciate.

“I always say, there’s more room for improvement,” she said.
Brown’s mother, Bridgit, said that as long as she continues to volunteer her singing talent, she will pay for her daughter’s voice lessons. And that is OK with her daughter, who believes that volunteering will provide her the opportunity to sing the songs she loves the most.