Have you chosen your ‘walk-up music?’

As Steve and I walked into Chico State’s Bell Memorial Union on Wednesday, a student called to him, “Hey! What’s your walk-up music going to be?”

Steve responded, “It’s a surprise!”

As you probably know, walk-up music refers to a song that escorts a baseball player as he heads to bat. In looking up the origin of walk-up music, I found a very charming story on MLB.com. Basically, in the 1970s a young woman named Nancy Faust, who liked playing the organ, applied for a job with the Chicago White Sox. Faust started doing little backs-and-forths between game announcer Harry Caray and herself, where he’d say something on the radio, and she’d play, “I’m just wild about Harry,” on the organ.

This morphed into what she called “intro music” for players as they approached the plate, where Faust made connections to something she knew about them. Thus, walk-up music was born.

In the Perez family, the topic of walk-up music was born in the early 2000s when our kids were playing Little League. The song that you pick, we explained, should psych you up and tell the cheering crowd — because obviously they are cheering for you in this fantasy — something important about you. This was just a fun thought experiment, because Little League didn’t actually play walk-up music for 7-year-olds back then.

Landing on just the right phrase from a song that will only play for 20 seconds or so is also part of the game. For example, while Steve has imagined using many baseball walk-up songs over the years, a recent choice is by the New Zealand comedy band Flight of the Conchords. They have a completely absurd but lively song called “Boom King” that is absolutely inappropriate and not about hitting dingers. But if you cued up just one part — “Who’s the Boom King? (Who?); I’m the Boom King! (What?); Who’s the Boom King? (Tell me now!); I’m the Boom King! (He’s the Boom King!)” followed by some funny “chaka chaka chaka” sounds — I guarantee the crowd would go wild.

I say all of this to illustrate how much Steve and I enjoy finding just the right song for an occasion. When he told me earlier this month that he was thinking of using a song by the locally loved, funky marching band MarchFourth, I knew it was a good call.

MarchFourth songs are super peppy and hard to ignore, as are their live performances that include circus-type acts. We’ve seen them a couple of times in Chico now and plan to every time the Portland-based band is nearby.

The choice of using MarchFourth’s “Call to Action,” Steve explained to the Chico State crowd, felt relevant as he was thinking about how a complicated university is run by people doing so many different things. When it all comes together — just like a MarchFourth song that has 15 people on stage playing every kind of instrument, plus stilt-walkers, acrobats and jugglers moving among the crowd — it creates an amazing and energetic environment. He said it better, but you get the gist.

When I think of my own walk-up music, a song with a theme of “girl power” often seems motivational … you know, like Beyonce’s “Run the World (Girls).” But my musical taste tends toward an adolescent boy from the 1990s, so a Nirvana song or a ska-punk anthem is more likely to inspire me. At this point in life, I’m just not sure what fits.

Also, I don’t want to walk onto a stage and have people looking at me, so there’s that.

Tanya Perez is married to Chico State president Steve Perez. She is a longtime journalist, having worked for 17 years at The Davis Enterprise as a reporter, associate editor, and columnist, and now as an editor for student journalists at EdSource.org. Reach her at [email protected].