How to Sing Well and Move Your Audience

ARTISTRY

Having a great voice with perfect vocal technique is terrific, but most audiences don’t pay to hear perfect vocal technique. They come to a performance or buy a song because they want to feel something- they want to be moved.

The ability to move an audience is what distinguishes an artist from someone with a great voice who, though they may sing technically well, is not yet an artist.

Artistry is the ability to always be absolutely in the moment, believing every word you are singing, with absolute control of a voice that responds readily to every emotion.

How do you reach that level of artistry?

You need to personalize the song. Even if you did not write the song, you should be able to sing it as if every thought came from your own heart and soul. Singing is not just making beautiful sounds and coming in on time.

A great singer is also a convincing actor! Often, singers who have spent years developing their vocal technique tend to ignore this equally important component.

Countless times in lessons, I ask singers to tell me what a lyric means, and they either don’t know or they reference the lyric in the third-person: She is sad because…….

Uh- she?

YOU are singing the song! You have to take another person’s words and convincingly make them your own, if you want an audience to be moved by your performance.

Unless you can use your body, face, and gestures believably, your beautiful voice will not move the audience. Singers must learn to act convincingly, and that requires a complete commitment to the text.

An artist must give a completely original and fresh interpretation of the song. Copying an established artist’s choices is all right as a first step, but a singer must learn to add their own textures and colors.

Your interpretation of a song must be unique and different from the original.

Change vocal improvisations, change subtext and meaning, change gestures. Don’t be a copy-cat! 

Make your performance unique.

Here’s how:

CONNECTING TO THE TEXT

The first step is to separate the lyrics from the music and convincingly and emotionally act the text without the help of the music, just like speaking lines in a play.

The music won’t do all the work- believable acting is required to sell the song.

To be a good singing actor requires analyzing the song phrase by phrase to discover the emotional subtext of each line and to make it personal. This kind of preparation includes writing. Print out the song lyrics double-spaced.

You will be writing in the spaces of the lyrics. Read through the lyrics several times and then answer these questions about the lyric:

Who? What? When and Where? Why? How?

ANSWERING THE WHO, WHAT, WHEN & WHERE, WHY, AND HOW

If you don’t know the answers to these questions, your lack of preparation and connection will show up in your eyes and face, and the audience, while they may not know why, will not be moved. Being wholly involved with the story may mean the difference between polite golf claps at the end of a song and a rip-roaring standing ovation.

Rather than guessing what the songwriter had in mind when he/she wrote the song, you are instead going to make this song personal to you. You will be designing a scene in your own personal play or movie. You can write the scene any way you want and create the characters any way you would like.

The story doesn’t have to have any relationship to the original composer’s truth; instead, it becomes your truth.

Answer the following questions and work through the subsequent exercises:

WHO

Who are you singing to? Who are you singing about? Pick a very specific person and keep that person and your relationship with them in your mind’s eye as you sing the song. This has to be a person that you feel some kind of emotional intensity around. Otherwise, you won’t be moved when you sing the song.

WHAT

What just happened before you started to sing the song? What made you suddenly have the urge to break into song to express yourself? If you can’t think of something real, make something up! You are writing a screenplay, remember? What does the setting look like? What are the characters saying to each other, what are they wearing? What do you want right now? I want to____(convince, seduce, destroy, etc).

WHEN and WHERE

When and Where does this scene occur specifically? Is it today, or in the future, or at a specific time in the past? Provide details about where you are. Make some cool stuff up; just let your mind wander and be creative.

WHY

Why were you prompted to express these emotions?

HOW

How does each line make you feel? How would you like the audience to feel? How would you like the person to whom you are singing to feel? What is the dominant emotion you are expressing in the verse? In the chorus? (It can change as the song progresses).

Be specific- instead of “happy “ or “sad” decide if you feel “delighted and amazed” or “so despondent you can’t do anything but sit on the couch waiting for the phone to ring.”

Specific details in your mind create a much deeper palette of subtle emotions on your face and in your body language, which the audience will pick up on. If you do this kind of work, writing out the answers and creating the world of the character, then inhabiting that world yourself, your performance will be much more connected to who you are authentically.

And when that happens, the audience feels it and knows it.

SPEAK THE LYRIC

Look again at your lyrics. What do those words make you feel as you read them? Take your sheet music and write in the emotions that you associate with each phrase (not what you think the songwriter meant) above that phrase.

You, as the artist, might choose a different interpretation of the song than a prior artist has chosen- that is your artistic right!

Now, speak the lyric as if you are acting onstage in a play. Pretend you are saying the words to a real person. Are you convincing? Speak the text with conviction. Don’t speak the lyric in a sing-song fashion- speak it like you are having a conversation with a real person.

When you can do this convincingly, aware of the emotional subtext of each and every phrase, you will bring that awareness to your performance.

Although difficult, taking the music away and focusing entirely on the text, separate from the music, forces you to be very clear about the lyric itself, and forces you to figure out how to convey the emotion of the lyric without the music to help you.

Try it again, but this time, speak each phrase into a mirror, trying several different emotional interpretations of the phrase. Though you might feel silly doing this, looking in a mirror tells you what you look like to the audience.

Use it!

Finally, video yourself doing this exercise, review, and analyze.

If you were performing on TV with the sound off, your audience should still know the emotional content of your song, just by seeing your face and gestures.

KNOW YOUR OBJECTIVE

Always begin with an objective. The objective may change throughout the course of the song. For each phrase of the song, write in the objective of that phrase: I want to……. (convince, win, seduce, reject, lie to, hurt, etc.).

Then raise the stakes: make up a story that prevents you from getting what you want. In other words, heighten the emotion- make it harder to succeed, and make yourself want it more. Now you have to be even more convincing

ADD SUBTEXT

Try this: speak the following phrase, using four completely different interpretations: I love you (thrilled),  I love you (pleading),  I love you (sarcastic), I love you (hopeless) How did each of those emotional subtexts change the facial expressions, hand gestures, and body language?

This is really valuable work! Your body, face, gestures and emotions all have to be fine-tuned and believable if you want to be a singer who can move an audience.

How many singers can you name who have transitioned to movie roles? (Queen Latifah, Mariah Carey, Christina Aguilera to name just a few). Do you think the fact that they were great singing actors helped to make the transition to film possible? 

Of course, it did!

VIDEO AND REVIEW

Video is a powerful tool and is easily available these days. Video your rehearsal and review. What works, and what needs improvement? Now, try again. You will eventually work out gestures and movements that are natural if you work from the inside out- from the feelings the text generates.

I recommend using video as a teaching tool, just as I recommend making audio recordings of every lesson.

Singers need visual and audio feedback to know what to improve. We have no idea what we really look like (or sound like) unless we record, review, and analyze.

Many new singers insist that they will be “much better in front of people”.  Puh-leeeeeeez. Please don’t make the common beginner mistake of thinking you can wing it in a performance. 

You will NOT be better in front of an audience without extensive practice and rehearsal.

A professional rehearses everything, over and over. They don’t just wing it.

I assure you, Beyonce rehearses every move, facial expression, and gesture.

A lot.

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