Loyle Carner & Benjamin Zephaniah

A poet and a songwriter talk about their dyslexia:

The Letter and the Aeroplane

“The only thing I ever told that young man to do was sing ‘aeroplane’ instead of ‘airplane’ on ‘The Letter’— I was just tryin’ to make it flow better.”

Dan Penn, producer.

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Clapping Music: Steve Reich and Santi Carcasona

I caught Steve Reich, on the BBC here, talking about the Brussels Flamenco Show that 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:

Music Moves

Singing is a 3D activity. When you’re performing an English song, live or on YouTube, your international audience ‘reads’ you and your movements, closely. Your movements help your audience decide whether to relax and trust you. To let your voice into their hearts.

Remember this and remember Tommy Krångh:

Tommy says:

“I am always all in. I want to give the whole experience of the music. I have to give my whole body. When I get on the stage the music is pumping and I lose myself. I don’t know what’s happening. I am totally lost in the moment – but somehow I still know what exactly I am doing.”

The movements you make signal, more clearly than you might think, whether you believe, feel and understand the words that you’re singing. Or not.

The University of Oslo have put together a FutureLearn course, starting on February 1st, all about the relationship between movement and music. It’s free and available to anyone, anywhere in the world:

© Sing Better English, 2016

Wild Thing

It’s 1966. The Kinks’ manager gives you a chance to record Chip Taylor‘s Wild Thing, one take only, on borrowed time. It’s a song of few words. Choose one and pour your heart into it. Groovy? Love?  Or the vaguer, more intriguing wild? Choose well or you’ll be back on the building site forever.

By the way – don’t be fooled by the stripy fancy dress in the video. There’s a bricklayer’s heart beating desperately beneath it:

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: