Monday
Apr092007
finding my voice, part 1
Monday, April 9, 2007 at 03:52AM
I was singing a song last night on the new Caedmon’s Call record and was having a lot of trouble with it. I decided to take a break and walked upstairs and told Alison “I just can’t seem to find the right voice.� I realized quickly that I actually meant two things when I said that. This post is about the first thing.
I came to the conclusion a couple years ago that most of my favorite singers have a few different “voices�. Guys like Tom Petty or Lyle Lovett have great voices, but they always sound exactly the same. Tom Waits is always gruff, but sometimes it’s the lonesome howl and other times it’s the distorted circus yeller. A guy like Bono does the Joshua Tree power-ballad belt, the erratic opera falsetto, the almost spoken-word gravelly deep old man and the MacPhisto over-the-top schmaltzy thing. I love that.
I feel like this kind of singing is almost a form of acting. The singer takes on a different character and it radically changes how a song will feel or what it will mean.
The different voices cause me to take the words in different ways.
Long-time readers will know that my favorite album of all time is U2’s Achtung, Baby. There is one line on that record that always bugged me. In Who’s Going To Ride Your Wild Horses? Bono is singing this heartfelt sad love song, and then sings these lines:
“Well, you stole it cause I needed the cash,
and you killed it cause I wanted revenge,
and you lied to me cause I asked you to,
Baby, can we still be friends?�
That last line always bugged me. It just seems so pathetic, and doesn’t seem to fit in at all. Now it’s one of my favorite lines, and it’s all because of the voice (and me finally catching it). He changes to this subtly sarcastic tone at the top of that verse. It’s almost spiteful. Where I used to think he was listing the things she’d done for him and he didn’t want to lose her, I now think that’s probably something she said to him that ticked him off. I could go on forever with my theories, but I do know that becomoing aware of the different character completely changed the song to me. And for the better.
The application of this, at least for me, is that I’m realizing I write in a slightly different voice for Caedmon’s and so I have to learn to sing that way to make the songs feel right. In the months of writing for this record I’ve always kept in mind the history of the band, the sonic rules they’ve sort of set up to define what the band sounds like.
Every artist has them and there are times to try to tear those walls down and times to use them creatively to make stronger the artist’s statement. This has been a time to redefine Caedmon’s Call using a lot of the sounds that initially set them apart. I’ve never sung in that sonic context before and my voice sounds unfamiliar in that setting, to me anyway.
So now I’m having fun with it. I’ve been recording take after take, not intending to keep any of them, but just to see what different things I can come up with and to find out what I have to work with. I’m excited to find “the voice� that lets my voice belong here.
How about you? Have you found this in the music you listen to? Any examples? Any ideas of how this relates to other professions/hobbies/passions?
I came to the conclusion a couple years ago that most of my favorite singers have a few different “voices�. Guys like Tom Petty or Lyle Lovett have great voices, but they always sound exactly the same. Tom Waits is always gruff, but sometimes it’s the lonesome howl and other times it’s the distorted circus yeller. A guy like Bono does the Joshua Tree power-ballad belt, the erratic opera falsetto, the almost spoken-word gravelly deep old man and the MacPhisto over-the-top schmaltzy thing. I love that.
I feel like this kind of singing is almost a form of acting. The singer takes on a different character and it radically changes how a song will feel or what it will mean.
The different voices cause me to take the words in different ways.
Long-time readers will know that my favorite album of all time is U2’s Achtung, Baby. There is one line on that record that always bugged me. In Who’s Going To Ride Your Wild Horses? Bono is singing this heartfelt sad love song, and then sings these lines:
“Well, you stole it cause I needed the cash,
and you killed it cause I wanted revenge,
and you lied to me cause I asked you to,
Baby, can we still be friends?�
That last line always bugged me. It just seems so pathetic, and doesn’t seem to fit in at all. Now it’s one of my favorite lines, and it’s all because of the voice (and me finally catching it). He changes to this subtly sarcastic tone at the top of that verse. It’s almost spiteful. Where I used to think he was listing the things she’d done for him and he didn’t want to lose her, I now think that’s probably something she said to him that ticked him off. I could go on forever with my theories, but I do know that becomoing aware of the different character completely changed the song to me. And for the better.
The application of this, at least for me, is that I’m realizing I write in a slightly different voice for Caedmon’s and so I have to learn to sing that way to make the songs feel right. In the months of writing for this record I’ve always kept in mind the history of the band, the sonic rules they’ve sort of set up to define what the band sounds like.
Every artist has them and there are times to try to tear those walls down and times to use them creatively to make stronger the artist’s statement. This has been a time to redefine Caedmon’s Call using a lot of the sounds that initially set them apart. I’ve never sung in that sonic context before and my voice sounds unfamiliar in that setting, to me anyway.
So now I’m having fun with it. I’ve been recording take after take, not intending to keep any of them, but just to see what different things I can come up with and to find out what I have to work with. I’m excited to find “the voice� that lets my voice belong here.
How about you? Have you found this in the music you listen to? Any examples? Any ideas of how this relates to other professions/hobbies/passions?
Reader Comments (28)
Martin Sexton. That guy has millions of voices and they are all superior.
Martin Sexton rocks the hell out of me !!!!
Yep, his new album "Seeds" is more rooted in his early stripped down days and also has the most "pop" sounding songs of his career, it's not my favorite of his, but I've never disliked anything he has done.