I give out a small unofficial award for some of my favorite original songs in English that are part of the Open Mic contest. How do I participate? * Make a valid entry to Open Mic. * Make sure the title makes it clear that the song is original and in English or an instrumental. * Be someone other than me. (Sorry Spanish musicians. You guys are great but I don't understand well enough to evaluate the songs.) Everyone I select gets these prizes: * A full upvote from me on their post. * 4 SBD transfer * One more full upvote if they comment on this post. Upvotes are ~22c this week because Steem keeps going down and I hosed my voting power. As usual the goal is to make sure this post and my Open Mic post combined feed the prizes, so if this gets upvoted a bunch I'll send out a second round. A lot of the usual suspects were out or making covers this week, so we get some new voices and one who's back in this post for the first time since I first did it in Week 80. Three winners this week.

Winners in no particular order:

"Gemini's Lament" by @katrina-ariel
Your cadence and voice combine to give this a showtune-esque quality that I really enjoy. I also love how you take a very standard topic and just get deeper and deeper into it as the song goes on. Well done, and a great first entry.

"Golden Light Cafe" by @carljohn.

Look, stealing John Prine and keeping him in your garage is not fair to the rest of us. You have a ridiculous way with the language here and it's amazing. On a line-by-line level this is one of the best songs I've heard here. Stunning.

"Dear Deer" by @melavie

I just love listening to you. And the way you universalize things in the song is great - it's a song to a deer but I still feel like it's a song to me too. "We are visible to the seekers of our kind" is particularly nice. Very well done.

Open Mic Support

I have a challenge for other people to do just what I'm doing here: create a nonprofit curation post featuring songs that you love from Open Mic and giving the post rewards to the performers. I'd really love it if we could get a whole bunch of these going. Basic details are in this post. I'm pledging a 100% upvote to help get your posts' growth started, and to make sure you get something out of it, I'll buy you a @steembasicincome share (worth 0.5 Steem) every week you participate. Feel free to take my format or create one of your own. Mention me in the post, or come to the SBI Discord where I have a channel just for this project, or hit me up on the Open Mic Discord or anywhere else you happen to see me. The tag for this project is #openmicsupport

Hey! Before you upvote this post!

**If you want to upvote because you liked the songs, go upvote *their* posts!** (If their posts have paid out, see if they've commented here and give them an upvote.) If you want to upvote this one *also* that's fine but please reward the songwriters first.