I Heard it Through the Grapevine

LaVance Colley sings Ariane Grande

A great cover version lives its own life. As a child of the original, it carries DNA forwards, but shines on its own terms. You recognise the mother’s eyes or the father’s nose, but the face itself is new.

Watch Post Modern Jukebox smooth, slow and soulify Ariane Grande’s Focus until it sounds as if Ariane was covering a long lost Ray Charles number. What a difference LaVance Colley makes:

Singing 3 gardens into life

“When we moved to our new house, for us kids it was a huge huge big deal to have trees in the back garden. Where we had lived in Selly Park, the back garden was more concrete than grass, so it felt like we were in a forest. Some of my happiest memories are of endless summer holidays where it seems like we spent most of the time in the garden, making up dance routines or having mammoth waterfights. The song is a celebration of that.”                                Laura Mvula, speaking to the Birmingham Post

Say the English word garden out loud. Two equal syllables, neat and tidy. Now listen to Laura Mvula unzip that first syllable and pack it full of happy memories, of sanctuary and joy:

Nectarine? Soup Tureen? Sex Machine?

If I asked you to identify the two most surprising words from James Brown’s Get Up (I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine, one of your choices would be machine. Mr Brown knows that he’s invited an intriguing image into his song. He doesn’t want it to grow in his listeners’ minds before he has a chance to shape it to his will. He works hard and fast to make sure that sex machine becomes a powerful ally, not a powerful distraction. He avoids winking or giving a quick pelvic thrust as he sings sex machine. He keeps his audience with him by keeping the word sex neutral. He treats it no differently from get, on or up. Like a fax machine. Watch him and ask yourself: if he’d emphasised sex or sex machine, would he have intensified the power of the song? Or would he have stepped over the invisible but definite line into sleaziness?

Wringing the Exotic out of Golden Brown

When a white man sings about a brown girl, the word brown carries a complicated history. Think of Jagger’s Brown Sugar. Think of the Stranglers kneading and stretching the diphthong of plain old brown until it exhales into the exotic, sensuous ‘otherness‘ of Golden Brown.

Singer/songwriter Kizzy Crawford has different plans for both brown and golden, as a home-made antidote to the bullying she experienced as a child. How does she warm up the words, making them personal and precious, not exotically ‘other’? She stretches the diphthong of brown beyond anything the Stranglers imagined. Then, like spun sugar, she twirls brown into a shape that’s light and warm:

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: