Bend, Stretch and Chop with Frankie Valli. Or lose your job.

Imagine this: Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons are on tour in your country. One of the singers falls off stage at the soundcheck and breaks their leg. You’re the last-minute replacement. This could be your big break.

Frankie makes a last minute change to the set list. He adds The Night. You don’t know the song, but you smile at Frankie anyway. “My favourite song,” you say. You feel sick.

A roadie hands you a dog-eared copy of the score, with all the latest additions to the song. Frankie smiles. You gulp. Read the lyrics now. The first thing you notice? An awful lot of words.

If English isn’t your first language, it can be difficult, when you sing, to know where to bend words or break lines without damaging their integrity. You’ll need to squeeze, stretch and chop in all the right places if you want the words to fit the music in The Night. You’ll lose the job if you don’t get it right.

Smile. Borrow Frankie’s diamond-studded pencil. Get to work. Find a private corner. Listen to The Night. Mark your lyrics to show where the strongest stress falls in each line. That’ll be your scaffolding :

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Turn fuzzy lyrics into a powerful cover

Imagine this: you want to sing a cover version of a song. The song’s in English. You like the chorus, but you can’t hear the other words clearly. What do you do? Close your eyes, mumble a version of the words you didn’t hear and hope your audience doesn’t notice or care?  They will.

Suppose you want to cover Paolo Nutini’s Scream (Funk My Life Up). It’s a song that switches between clear and fuzzy lyrics. Every word up to and including the first “Funk my Life Up” is clear, but what on earth comes after that? No problem: grab a pen and a piece of paper. Write down every word, or syllable you hear in the next line (around 20 seconds in). It begins with “Lips” and lasts around 5 seconds. You might need to listen a few times. Good luck:

Nothing Else Matters: but please don’t SHOUT!

It’s very tempting, when you reach the rockier choruses of songs like Metallica‘s Nothing Else Matters, to forget your good intentions, as far as enunciation and clarity are concerned. Some people give in to temptation and start SHOUTING incomprehensibly. Please don’t. Shouting isn’t singing. Your audience deserves more from you.

Every word is important to the song and to the songwriter. Listen to James Hetfield from Metallica. He wrote the song. He never loses control of his words, no matter how powerfully he uses his voice:

It Ain’t Necessarily Robert Plant, but you can still hear every word

Cab Calloway needs no introduction. He’s another master of precise enunciation. Even when he’s scatting nonsense syllables, each one has a clear beginning and a clear end. Listen to him guiding his audience, step by step, through Gershwin’s convoluted song:

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: