I Heard it Through the Grapevine

Rag’n’Bone Man

You pick up your mother tongue through love and listening. You pick up your singing voice in the same way:

Eliza Carthy & The Ratcatchers: The Good Old Way

Eliza Carthy weaves the ay, oy and y sounds  of The Good Old Way into a mesmerising tapestry of serious hope. The lines are short, most end in a y, but The Good Old Way is from repetitive. Y is one of those sounds that a singer can stretch, smooth, relish or dismiss:

If you sing in English, give y, and every sound it’s part of: ey, oy, ay, ry, ty etc. good attention. Y can fly or it can dampen. Y can be soft and romantic or it can be a clipped end to hope. It’s up to you.

©SingBetterEnglish2017

Lady Leshurr

“I started thinking, ‘You know what? Why don’t I just rap?’ Because it’s just poetry with a beat behind it, really.”

Lady Leshurr in The Guardian.

RAYE

The best cover versions are cocktails. The original spirit of the song, with a twist of something new. New and personal.

RAYE pours a full measure of Aaliyah, electronica, South London and Jill Scott into her cover of Crazy.  What do you think?

Clapping Music: Steve Reich and Santi Carcasona

I caught Steve Reich, on the BBC here, talking about how a Brussels Flamenco Show inspired his 1972 Clapping Music. The flamenco was dismal, until the Spanish performers began to mark time with complicated clapping patterns, entrancing Mr Reich in the process. Which led me, in a wonderful ‘completing the circle’ way, back to Spain and to Catalan Percussionist Santi Carcasona:

In a Broken Dream

“It was my mate who convinced me to do it. He ran a car showroom, and he said, ‘I’ve got this group come from Australia, but the singer’s not very good. Can you do a demo for me?’ I said, ‘What do I get?’ He said, ‘Well, I don’t have any money. I’ll give you a set of carpets.’ That was 1969″

                                                                                                                         Rod Stewart

Summertime Sadness: the shape of words

If you’re thinking of writing a song in English, choose words for their shape as well as their meaning. Meaning can float in the air (“I am the Walrus?”) but the shape of English words in song must align with the feeling of your music.

Think of Lana Del Rey’s Summertime Sadness. From the title to the chorus it’s a masterful mix of sound shapes. Summertime: soft, warm and measureless. Sadness: deep and hazy. Together, each intensifies the other. I’ve chosen Miley Cyrus’ cover version, from BBC Live Lounge. You can see how Miley shapes her mouth and where she breathes, to allow each word its languorous character:

Keeping the beat: Panaderas de Pan Duro

El Naán choose their words to enhance the beat of their hands and the strength of their message. You don’t need to speak Spanish to understand them. The sounds of the words speak for themselves: a human language. Filmed in a single take:

The Weeping Song

Weeping is an ancient English word. Its sound and shape are crafted to speak directly to the human heart. We feel it; we don’t think it:

Hocus Pocus

“It’s funny because I studied a lot of classical piano, organ and flute, but I never studied yodelling. And it made me famous throughout the world. It’s really funny.”

Lorde: Yellow Flicker Beat, live at the BBC

There’s a point at which all the conscious thought and preparation for a song composts down into pure energy. The singer lives the song and the song lives in them. It’s a privilege to watch alchemy in action:

© Sing Better English, 2016

Joan Baez and Judas Priest: Diamonds and Rust

Judas Priest added more than a touch of heavy metal to Joan Baez’s Diamonds and Rust. But listen to the beating heart of Joan’s song: time and the wistful distance of memory, coming through in Rob Halford‘s voice, between the electric guitars and the crashing drum, like a blackbird singing in a deep forest. Respect:

Black Raven

You won’t find a single word of English in it, but here’s an English question: what feeling does this Cossack song convey to you?

You don’t need to understand Russian  to play the game. Empathy is a universal:

Singing as slowly as a bird

One of 2015’s Brighton Festival treasures was Marcus Coate’s Dawn Chorus at Fabrica.

Imagine 14 humans, each in its ‘natural habitat’ (taxi, bath-tub, kitchen), sounding (and looking) like Northumbrian birds. The sound is all human, the speed is all bird:

Dem bones, dem bones, dem disobedient bones

People throw themselves into Dem Bones with such enthusiasm because it feels like pure rebellion. We all carry a schoolteacher voice in our heads. Each time we sing dem, the teacher voice squeals those. But the music takes us by the hand and leads us out of earshot. You can sing dem bones, you can sing them bones, but the music just won’t allow you to sing those bones. The music’s right, the teacher’s wrong. The world turned upside down.

Watch the Four Lads version of Dem Bones from the final episode of The Prisoner and you’ll see the percussive, rebellious dem sound get under the skin of everyone in the courtroom. Even the judge:

Why Starlings Don’t Bother With Synchronised Swimming

As David Attenborough puts it: a sight to cheer us all in the darkest time of year:

Your Woman was My Woman

When you sing in English, repeated pairs of words are a gift to you, and to your listeners. If you use them well.

You establish your ‘standard’ pronunciation of words early in every song. Your listeners calibrate their emotional understanding of you accordingly. They read every single change in emphasis and breath against your own personal ‘standard’. You’re free to move away from the ‘normal’, to play any word-pair like bongo drums, moving from one to the other, harder and softer, lighter and deeper, to weave layers of subtle meaning.

Macho and hembra

In Spanish, the larger, deeper drum of the two is called the ‘female’ (hembra) and the smaller is the ‘male’ or macho. Make of that what you will.

White Town sings the words your and woman differently each time, stretching Bing Crosby’s straightforward My Woman into a far more complicated creature. There’s a Twelfth Night gender shifting quality to his song. There is no stable ground, except in the repeated Your Woman mantra. We listen harder to White Town’s subtle changes because he knows how to make us listen:

It’s Hard to Sing Reggae When Your Head is Full of Strawberry Jam

She wasn’t a bad singer. She hit every note. But the word Jamming just didn’t sound convincing. Then I realised – she wasn’t thinking of jam in a Bob Marley sense. She was thinking of this:

Diana Ross and the missing B

When you sing, you have a choice. The choice to bury a consonant and the choice to bring it out into the light when it suits you.

Listen, with your eyes closed, to the Supremes singing My World is Empty Without You. What’s missing from Diana Ross‘ life? A lover called Bay? eBay? A Turkish Bey? What word can you hear?

If you know the song, you know the answer. If English is your native language, you’ve guessed the answer. So ask yourself a different question: when does Diana choose to sing the word clearly, right through to the last consonant? Why then and nowhere else?

Cécile McLorin Salvant: clear as crystal and cool as jazz

We’ve spoken here and here about jazz singers like Amy Winehouse or Gregory Porter ghosting hard consonants like t or d at the end of their words, smoothing the sound to suit their music.

There is another way.

Cécile McLorin Salvant maintains a perfect jazz mood, without sacrificing a single consonant. Watch her tell the story of Poor Butterfly: