Marking the beat: Paranoid, 50 years on

Watch a supremely young Ozzy Osbourne keeping the beat with his head as he sings. Paranoid is a song of carefully placed syllables:

Four Candles or Fork Handles?

Sharing a language never guarantees understanding. Expectation is key. But it’s hard to know what to expect, when you work in a shop that sells a little of everything:

© Sing Better English, 2016

Englishing Brazil for Export

If you wanted to encourage a localist English squirrel to try their first nibble of Brazil nut, what would you use to tempt them closer? Macadamia or hazelnuts?

Sergio Mendes knew that the 1960s’ English speaking world needed a touch of the familiar to entice them gently into his music. I’ll talk a bit more about that in a minute. First, a question: in the Mas Que Nada video, you see two women lip-synching to the vocals, but you’re hearing only one of their voices, multi-tracked. For fun, which of the two looks as if they own that voice?

Hea-a-a-a-art Full of… Sand

What’s in a Name?

Imagine this: you’re the vocalist in The Pink Phylloid psychedelic tribute band.  Tonight’s gig? A chateau near St Tropez. The usual dressing room routine: paisley, kohl, crushed velvet, hot thyme.

Your manager bursts in. Le Twitter’s aflame. Not as you’d planned…

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: