Jacques Brel: the easy and the important

When you learn a song by ear, especially when it’s in a foreign language, the ‘easy’ words, the words you know, leap out at you. Words you recognise, like a favourite auntie walking towards you through a crowd of strangers.

Give your aunt a bear hug and a box of chocolates, by all means. She’s special to you. But don’t scream “here’s Aunt Lavinia, everybody,” and expect the world to share your enthusiasm. Your Aunt Lavinia is like an ‘easy’ word in a song. She’s familiar to you, but unremarkable to anyone else in the airport.

In an Aunt Lavinia at Arrivals situation, we know to keep our interest personal and private. We hug her hello, then we take her home. When we sing in a foreign language, it’s easy to get unbalanced by familiar words, to pump undeserved energy into words, just because we recognise them. I’ll tell you a story about Jacques Brel and me …

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Stepping into a song: “Le Premier Bonheur du Jour”

When you sing, you’re telling a story. Like any good actor, you need to believe the words as they come out of your mouth; to choose them. No matter who wrote them.

Watch Françoise Hardy switch from ‘young female guest’ on Sacha Distel‘s TV show to ‘woman in love’.  We believe her as she starts to sing. Why? Because she believes herself. You can see her refocus and prepare in the video. Watch her pupils get bigger, then smaller, around 14 seconds in, as she prepares to sing Frank Gérald‘s words:

Scott Walker: Jackie and Inspired Translation

It takes a brave translator to turn Jacques Brel‘s “Même si un jour à Knokke-le-Zoute/Je deviens comme je le redoute” into “And if one day I should become/A singer with a Spanish bum“:

Carte sur Table: Go To Sleep, You Little Baby

© Sing Better English, 2016

Christine and the Queens: Making English Physical

When you read or imagine a word, you create a physical shape and a ‘feeling’ inside your mind. The form adapts and flows. Heart holds one shape in the mind of a surgeon when she’s at work in the operating theatre and quite another when she’s at home, reading a precious love letter.

Héloïse Letissier of Christine and the Queens brings the music and the words of her song Tilted into such clear physical focus that you would understand the meaning with the volume turned off:

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: