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…

It’s Hard to Sing Reggae When Your Head is Full of Strawberry Jam

She wasn’t a bad singer. She hit every note. But the word Jamming just didn’t sound convincing. Then I realised – she wasn’t thinking of jam in a Bob Marley sense. She was thinking of this:

No Milk Today – in the Eternal Present

What’s the difference between the way you say the word today and the way Peter Noone sings it in No Milk Today? Does he sound angry with his milkman, happy or sad?

I Said, ‘I’ll See What I can Do’

The best singers and songwriters cram a world of subtle meaning into tiny words like do. How?

Listen to the Pulp song Common People. Near the beginning, you’ll hear Jarvis Cocker sing: Well, what else could I do? / I said, “I’ll see what I can do.” Repetition and exact rhyme of simple words can sound amateurish and boring. Jarvis wrote the song. Why repeat do here? Choice or necessity? Does it work?

How does Jarvis invest each do with a different feeling when he sings? What’s the effect?

If English isn’t your first language and you’re struggling to hear a difference between the two do’s, let’s backtrack a moment: listen to the two o‘s in Common. Can you hear the difference between them?

Hamlet or Tarzan? The choice is yours.

Verbs bring language to life. If you don’t pronounce English verbs when you sing, your song will be as dead as an ex-parrot.

“Ha!” you retort. “Do you think I’m stupid? Of course I sing the verbs, all the verbs: do, love, fall, believe, sigh, echo, sparkle. Any verb a song requires. Name a single verb that I’ve missed. Speak.”

Easy. The M verb.

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: