Cover Versions: To Be Or Not To Be?

© Sing Better English, 2016

White Wine in the Sun: the Tardis of ‘Mum’

Imagine this: you’re Tim Minchin. You’re writing a song. It’s about love and the pull of home. You want to list your faraway family members. How to organise the list? It matters. There’s a surprising emotional power to the first and the last in a list, especially in song.

Here are a few options (using the family members that Tim names):

• …my mum, my brother and sisters, my dad and my gran
• … my brother and sisters, my gran, my mum and my dad
• …my dad, my brother and sisters, my gran and my mum
• …my gran, my dad, my brother and sisters and my mum

You’re looking for emotional power, a vivid sound picture and a pleasing rhythm to your words. Where you place gran is surprisingly important to the balance of the group.

How does Tim choose to arrange his family? Listen:

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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: