Nanaimo songstress Mikaila Tombe is no stranger to performing in front of large crowds, but this summer she will find herself singing in front of her biggest audience yet.
Tombe, 17, has been selected to perform the official 2014 B.C. Summer Games theme song, Get in the Games, at the opening and closing ceremonies for the event, which will take place from July 17-20 in Nanaimo.
“It is going to be really exciting,” Tombe said. “We have a whole bunch of choreography and it is going to be the whole shebang. It’s exciting. I’ve never done anything like that.”
Tombe, a student at Dover Bay Secondary School, also performed at the official torch lighting ceremony, which took place in April. The ceremony featured a number of B.C. Summer Games alumni as well as dignitaries.
“That whole day was really interesting because I had never gotten to see that whole ceremony before,” Tombe said. “It was great. I was really happy. They all welcomed me with open arms and it was really awesome.”
The song Get In The Games was composed by J. Douglas Dodd and Nico Rhodes. The composers selected Tombe from a handful of Nanaimo-area singers.
“They told me that they had a couple artists in mind and that I happened to be one of them,” Tombe said. “Immediately I thought that would be really cool because it is a big stage and a huge audience.”
Although Tombe has been singing ever since she was a little girl, she began to take a serious approach to her talents when she reached her teens.
“I started gigging around town when I was about 13,” Tombe said.
Since then, Tombe has performed the national anthem at a number of Nanaimo Clippers hockey games and sang alongside blues artist David Essig.
When Tombe was 15-years-old she won the Re/Max Island Star Search competition, an event that featured more than 100 singers over the course of two months. Tombe said that it was during the competition when she realized that she truly loved to perform.
“I made it to the finals [and] just the way I felt during my performance, everything came and leading to that moment, went exactly as I hoped it would and it felt amazing,” Tombe said.
She just finished recording her first CD.
“I am really excited,” she said. “We’re going to be playing around town lots and getting that out.”
For more information, please visit bit.ly/MikailaTombeMusicFB.