If you've been out at a karaoke event in Durham over the past seventeen years, there's a good chance that Melvin Peña was there too.

Since he tried it out for the first time during his senior year of college, karaoke has been a big part of Peña’s life; and since making the Triangle his permanent home in 2009, he's helped to keep the artform alive locally through all of its ups and downs.

Peña says the first time he stepped up to the mic was during his tenure at the University of Notre Dame. He recalls the night as a sleepy Sunday, when everything in town was closed. In order to have a fun night out, he and his friends had to cross the state line into Michigan.

"We went to this townie bar and me and my friend Alexis did a duet version of Sonny & Cher's 'I Got You Babe,'" he recalled. "I don't know how I had never done it before. It's become a huge part of my life ever since."

Fikri Yucel

Melvin Peña singing karaoke at The Pinhook in downtown Durham.

Peña was raised Catholic, and he says that singing was always a big part of his life because of that.

"We always sang in church, and people always told me I had a nice voice," he said. "I never really thought about it, but it felt right to have the mic. It felt right to preen. It felt right to strut."

After finishing college at Notre Dame, Peña moved to Chicago to pursue a Ph.D. at Northwestern University. While there, he sang karaoke with a live band for the first time. The song? Dido's 1998 hit "Thank You," and Peña remembers nailing it.

"My voice could handle it at the time," he said. "I sang it in the actual key, which goes extremely high, with the live band. I was so thrilled."

Peña originally moved to the Triangle with his family in 1996. After his time in Chicago and being fully bitten by the karaoke bug, he decided it was time to come back. When he did, he befriended the folks at The Pinhook in downtown Durham, and started helping them promote a regular karaoke night.

Peña says that those events were a huge hit; the room was always packed and people would come from all over the Triangle to sing and support the others around them, whether they knew them or not.

"People would go from wallflowers to Freddie Mercury," he said. "They found something in themselves, and it wasn't just the karaoke. It was finding a supportive crowd. It's about finding a community. It's about being welcomed and feeling welcomed."

Even though Peña is indeed a great singer, he says you don't have to be one to succeed at karaoke. When asked what sets a good performance apart from a not-so-good one, he simply replied "effort and commitment."

"If you sing a song in a way that people enjoy and give it whatever you have, it doesn't matter if you can carry a tune or not," he said. "(At The Pinhook), the entire place would be dancing, everyone would cheer after every song. People were just there to have fun."

Between 2010 and 2022, Pinhook Karaoke won Indy Week's Best of the Triangle award several times. In 2020 and 2021, during the pandemic, Peña helped organize and promote Pinhook Karaoke events over Zoom. He says that like many things, however, karaoke in the Triangle has not been the same since lockdown.

Michelle Gottschalk

Melvin Peña singing karaoke.

"The pandemic changed a lot of things for a lot of people," he said. "I'm not gonna fib, karaoke's been thin on the ground since then."

Recently, Peña has been working to help start new karaoke nights around town, sometimes with success and sometimes not. Since May, he's been helping the folks at Crank Arm Brewery in Durham with a karaoke night every Saturday from 7 p.m to 10 p.m.

Local music connections

Aside from being a fixture on the local karaoke circuit, Peña is also one of the biggest supporters of the North Carolina music scene. As easy as it is to find him at a karaoke night, it might be even easier to run into him at a local show.

He says that one of his earliest memories of falling in love with the North Carolina music scene was after hearing Whiskeytown on WKNC, North Carolina State University's college radio station, during a visit home from college.

"I just felt like a door had opened up for me," he recalled. "I went to the CD store and bought that CD immediately."

Even while he was away at college, Peña had his finger on what was happening musically in North Carolina. He recalls discovering the Raleigh-based band Annuals and the Durham-based band Megafaun through their Daytrotter Sessions. He also remembers going to see The Mountain Goats at the iconic Chicago venue The Empty Bottle.

Once he made it back to the Triangle after college in 2009, he felt like he was home again.

Lindsay Metivier

Melvin Peña singing karaoke at The Pinhook in downtown Durham.

"Within three weeks of me moving back here, there was a local festival at the Armory called Durham Be Easy," he said. "It was like The Mountain Goats, The Beast, and Dasan Ahanu. I was like, 'Give me all of this all of the time.'"

Since then, he's been a devoted fan and show attendee of artists like Hiss Golden Messenger, Flock of Dimes, Sylvan Esso, and Skylar Gudasz, just to name a few. He lists Ex-Iguana, Cor de Lux, Object Hours, and Verity Den as a few of his current favorites.

Peña says it's hard for him to put into words what makes the North Carolina music scene so magical.

"One of the things that has made me such a fixture at so many local shows is that it just feels right to be there," he said. "It's where my joy is."

Outside of venues like the Haw River Ballroom, Peña says that the most exciting stuff these days is happening at DIY venues in Durham. He specifically mentions The Fuzzy Needle and Perfect Lovers as places where he's seen some of his favorite shows recently.

"These places feel like home to me," he said. "They're third places that I have not had since the pandemic, and I'm so thrilled with the types of music that is happening in these spaces."

PLAYLIST: Check out some of Melvin's favorite songs of the year so far by North Carolina artists.