When You Know Why You’re Happy

English words on the page are pinned to the dictionary. Music lifts words off the pin and breathes life, colour and complexity back into them. Intention shapes breath. Breath shapes sound.  Sound shapes meaning.

Think of ‘happy’. Light and joyful in the mouth of Pharell Williams, twisted into a painful shadow by Tom Robinson; Mary Margaret O’Hara lifts happy off the dictionary pin, and lets it fly free:

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Sing if you’re happy that way, hey

When you think of the English word happy, how do you imagine it? A hop and a skip across the double p, with a spring up into the air on the y? That typical Pharrell Williams-style happy.

Now listen to Tom Robinson’s happy. A shadow version:

Pharrell Williams: how to breathe a Happy H

The English H sound is relaxation. And a touch of breath. That’s all. If you can breathe, you’re halfway to an English H. More than halfway.

Sometimes it’s hard to trust your breath do all the work, especially if H is silent in your own language. Watch Pharrell Williams’ face as he sings the H of hot, here, happy and high. He looks relaxed and happy, doesn’t he? His H isn’t a nasty cough. It’s a smooth, easy breath.

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: