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October 26, 2011
How to sing a cover version
Next week Out of the Bedroom's tenth anniversary evening has an invitation to songwriters to cover songs by fellow OOTBers, and my preparations have had me thinking about what I do when I do a cover version.
Firstly I think there are two reasons to do them (apart from OOTB). One is as part of a set, to give an audience something familiar. I've always felt it's a strain to listen to a lot of songs I don't know at all (last time for me was a Gomez gig) and I sympathise with an audience. For this purpose you do a well-known song and you either do a new take on it (but not too new or it defeats the purpose), or you do a fairly faithful version, trying to find in it exactly what moved you to like the song in the first place.
The other reason is because you really like the song, and that becomes more of a dilemma. If you are taken with a song it can be hard to separate the song from the perfomance that brought it to your attention. Therein lies the challenge: to find the spark of the song that set you off, but not try to copy someone else's delivery. Hence, I don't cover Joni Mitchell songs, much as I love them - I can't make that song-peformance separation. How to get your own take on the song without copying but without putting your egotistic 'stamp' on it, taking the audience's attention away from the song onto you?
For OOTB I decided on three songs by friends of mine but had to narrow it down to two for reasons of time and poor lyric-learning. The techniques I use - I'm learning how I do this - seem to be:
1. daily mental rehearsal
Carry the song with you in daily life, even if you can't remember everything, just humming or quietly singing to yourself, imagining you're singing it to an audience. Let the song seep into you and gradually you'll seep into the song
2. a musical change
You have to change the music somehow. It could be as simple as key change that forces you to alter the melody, or a change of rhythm. That can help free the song from the known performance and begin to shape the new performance. For these two I probably changed the key - I don't even know what chords their owners played - but more important I changed the timing: one became reggae-like, the other slowed down to a crawl. These seemed to unlock the songs for me.
3. Getting the spirit of the words
My technique for getting the emotions in the words is to speak them in time to the music. That shows me how I'd say these things, which is a step on the way to how I'd sing them. Someone on Facebook was praising The Sound of Silence the other day and I commented how, while I love the performance, I always hated the way the lines didn't scan 'because a vision softlEE-E creepING, left its seeds while I WAS sleepINg'. Compare with more modern Simon, which is just the pure rhythm of speech 'Fat Charlie the Archangel slipped into the room, he says I have no opinion about this, I have no opinion about that ..' So a big step for me is to find the spoken rhythm of the words then gradually lay that over the chords.
That's what did it for me with these two songs. I now feel like I have the right to sing them. What are they? You'll have to be there!
(Assumption 1: I get there early enough to get a spot; assumption 2: I remember the words. Assumption 3: the authors don't take out an injunction to stop me!)
Tuesday 1st November, the Montague Bar 8pm
October 26, 2011 in My music | Permalink
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