Adele in the Attic

It’s 2011. Adele is finally granted a visa to visit America:

Moonage Daydream, two ways

It takes a true artist to pour enjoyment into another man’s song and keep it there, despite the disinterest of the crowd. They’re waiting for Adele to take the stage:

Meanwhile, 15 years before Adele was born:

©SingBetterEnglish2018

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Standing Next to Me

Alex Turner forces you to guess. The first words of Standing Next to Me are too quick to hear clearly.  You guess: “Want to have her” or “Want her, have her“?  Either is possible, though the first is crass, the second wistful. Your age, gender and personality feed into your decision. If you find The Last Shadow Puppets cute, you give them the benefit of the doubt. You guess Want her, have her:

I etched the face of a stopwatch, on the back of a raindrop

Alex Turner of the Arctic Monkeys is famous for playing glorious games with the English language. If you’re covering an Arctic Monkeys’ song, make sure you know which words carry double meanings, so that you put emphasis in the right places.

Think of Piledriver Waltz: Alex uses misdirection to set up expectation. He places you in the back booth of a run-down hotel: By the pamphlets and the literature/On how to lose … What’s the next word? I bet you guessed weight. And Alex gives you the word you’re expecting, or at least its sound. Then he has fun:

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: