Yola – Love All Night (Work All Day)

Yola was born in Bristol.  Does she sound like Bristol, Tennessee or Bristol, UK?

Nothing Breaks Like a Heart: Visual Jeopardy Meets Vocal Wizardry

When you watch Miley Cyrus sing Nothing Breaks Like a Heart live, on SNL or on the BBC, the visuals inject a circus high-wire level of jeopardy. Our attention is heightened by the shameful thrill of possible disaster:

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Building a song

“Steve Earle has lived through the sort of horrors that have launched a million country songs: addiction, affliction, heartbreak, even prison. He wears them in his voice, but what’s most appealing about him is the wide-eyed, unmistakable fearlessness with which he goes about his life these days”     NPR Tiny Desk Concerts

Steve Earle and Shawn Colvin sing “Tell Moses” and chart the steps in its creation. How they bound Moses, Martin Luther King and Ferguson, Missouri together in words and music, in answer to the question: “What’s to be done?”:

Ward Thomas: Cartwheels

A happy word sung sadly is sadder than a sad word sung sadly. Song titles like The Weeping Song or Broken Dream give us fair warning. We’re ready for a story of hope crushed by time or tragedy. The singer can deepen what we already expect, but they can’t turn our expectation upside-down. A Broken Dream can’t be fixed in a song Weeping can’t disguise itself as laughter. Sad words are sad words.

But what do you expect from a song called Cartwheels? Joy and spontaneous exuberance? The innocent, happy whirl of love’s first days or weeks? Watch Catherine and Lizzy Ward Thomas sing the word cartwheels into sorrow. How? Listen for the catch in the voice on the ar of cartwheels. It throws a shadow on shared memory of carefree love:

Singing Jolene? Breathe when Dolly breathes

When you want help to improve your long distance running technique, you hire Mo Farah, not Usain Bolt. True?

If you want to improve your ability to maintain a long  e vowel sound over a long distance, you hire Dolly Parton as your personal trainer.

Stay with Dolly, to the last millisecond, as she sings the long, long e of Jolene. Breathe. Pace yourself. Don’t run ahead of Dolly to reach the n before she does. Stay with Dolly. Stay on the vowel. Ready? Get set. Go:

From Lorca to Leonard Cohen and back again

It’s a marvellous thing to write music that suits the original flamenco Spanish of the Lorca  poem as much as your English translation:

 

A squillo

It’s a lovely thing to see image and movement in the service of knowledge.  Ming Luke provides the words, Franz Palomares brings them to life and Ted-Ed provides the screen:

© Sing Better English 2020

What the Stranglers did to their Diphthongs

R.I.P. Dave Greenfield. Keyboardist, songwriter and singer.

When you listen to the Stranglers’ song Golden Brown, pay close attention to the way Hugh Conwell sings the word brown:

Lighting every step on the Stairway to Heaven

Stairway to Heaven is a classic choice for song contests.  If English is your native language, don’t take the words of this song for granted. If English isn’t your native language, don’t take the words of this song for granted. The words matter.

They matter, but they’re not a liturgy.  Dave Grohl captures the heart of the song without reciting every word in order. Or at all:

Bunraku

Because singing is communicating and connecting. And because all the arts inform each other:

Making music

Music: Poppy Ackroyd

Director: Ainslie Henderson

Producers: Puppet Animation Scotland

Akala: Carried Away

The mouth is almost like a percussive instrument. If you use it in the right way, your flow can have melody coming from the vowel sounds, but then percussion coming from the consonant sounds. And your flow of how you divide up these consonants and vowels determines how nice an instrument your rapping can become.

Akala

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.

Jazz, respect and memory

What’s a Polish song doing on a blog about singing in English? Blaszane Mordy is here to show that connecting with a song is a conscious skill, and an ability, that transcends language. You don’t need to understand Polish to ‘understand’ Lautari‘s Blaszane Mordy. Emotion pulses within the shape of the words alone: