Pharrell Williams & the 3 riddles of Happy

None of the words in Pharrell Williams’ songs are long or difficult, but there are often a lot of them. If you’re going to sing a cover of Happy, you need to give each word time and space.

Happy needs to feel relaxed and expansive. If you’re racing, blurring and stressing your way through the verse or the bridge, the song’s effortless mood will slide away from you. If English isn’t your first language: please don’t just sing the word happy loudly, every so often. Every word is important to the song.

Pharrell builds and boosts the light, upbeat feel of Happy by choosing and placing each word with precision. How does he fix them into place? We’ll look at his technique for framing the airy vowels, then at the first verse and the bridge. Watch the live video and ask yourself these 3 questions:

• Pharrell adds a sound to the end of most lines. What and why?
• Where does Pharrell take a breath in the line I’m a hot air balloon that could go to space? And where does he put the stress – hot, air or balloon?
• What do you hear when he sings Bring me down, can’t nothing? What does the th of nothing sound like? How about the ng?       

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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: