Guilty Feet Have Got No Rhythm

I was living in Greece when George Michael’s Careless Whisper became a disco favourite. Greek friends would ask me, “What does it mean, ‘Careless Whisper’?” I never knew how to answer. It didn’t seem fair to the song to try.

In memorable songs, the ‘meaning’ flows inside, around, and just behind the words. It’s sewn into the music and activated by the singer’s voice. George Michael sang the meaning into his words.

In an English dictionary, careless means this. Whisper means this. Simple. Weave careless and whisper into a haunting saxophone riff and the words jump free from their dictionary definitions. The same goes for guilty feet. George wasn’t the first to imagine guilty feet: he may have heard the phrase sung in church or school from Tate and Brady’s 17th century metrical version of the Psalms (Psalm 9, verse 15).  (Nahum Tate‘s words have reached forward into our century in While Shepherds Watched their Flocks by Night). We don’t know how guilty feet joined George’s personal word hoard. We know that he took them from the desert to the edge of the dance floor for a visceral feeling of betrayal trapped. It’s easy to imagine a bad conscience killing freedom. Easy to imagine, hard to translate.

The ‘meaning’ of Careless Whisper isn’t in the dictionary. Search for it there and you end up with David Armand:

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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: