Are you in a comfy chair? Do you have a cup of tea and five minutes?
I’d love to share with you two stories about vocal vulnerability.
1.
When I first heard Brandi Carlile’s breakout song, “The Story,” I was utterly blown away, shattered even. The power of her voice was like a freight train, and the sheer emotion within it sounded at times as though her voice was literally being ripped from her throat. As if she had to sing, as if her life depended upon it.
If you haven't heard this song in a while, or if you've never heard it, you can listen here.
At 2:52, Brandi’s voice totally falls apart. It’s rough, raw, unhinged, torn, and to me, terrifyingly beautiful. And it’s hands down my absolute favorite moment of the song.
According to lure, after recording the vocals in the studio, Brandi asked her studio team to let her go back and redo the vocals in that part because her voice had cracked so conspicuously.
Instead of redoing it, they convinced her to leave it in, recognizing that this raw emotion was what made the song so relatable, deep, powerful, and magical. And Jesus, were they right.
A few years, later, in an interview with journalist Gene Myers, Brandi said, “The break in my voice, you know, I’ve been criticized for it before and warned that maybe it’s a flaw. But when I do it, it’s a place to get power from and it feels good to let my voice break because I don’t really know how it’s going to recover and I think that unpredictability is what makes my voice keep people on edge.”
Wow. Just, wow. Thank God she didn’t listen to whomever it was who called this a “flaw!”
It’s so easy to feel that we need to cover up our “flaws” as singers. But what if we could embrace them, choose to see them as beautiful, even celebrate them? (To read about a dancer/choreographer who created an entire dance form out of his “flaws,” check out my blog post on Bob Fosse, “The Dance of Imperfection.”)
Does this mean we just give up on trying to make our voices stronger, more powerful, more versatile? Not at all. But I invite you to entertain the idea that the thing you feel is you biggest “flaw” just might be your biggest asset as an artist, and may be the very thing that helps you find your unique style and authentic sound!
2.
Let me start by saying that I know Michael Jackson can be a polarizing figure, and it can be difficult for some to separate his work as an artist from his behavior as a person. But however you feel about Michael, I’d invite you to listen to this story as well.
Michael Jackson’s Off the Wall, released in 1979, is my go-to album when I need some peppy music to cook a big dinner, paint a room, clean out a cupboard, or otherwise bust something out. But actually, my favorite song on that album is the ballad, “She’s Out of My Life.”
If you listen closely at 3:10, you’ll hear Michael break down crying, and sing through his tears in the most absolutely beautiful way. I don’t think I’ve ever listened to it without crying, I am not exaggerating. It just brings me to a place of the deepest grief within me, and connects me with the collective grief of humanity. There is a whole world contained within those few little seconds of sound.
I had been listening and crying to that song for years when I heard the story of how it was recorded. Apparently, although Michael’s stardom was at its highest, he was at a devastatingly low point in his life. He felt that he didn’t have any true friends, and that his inner circle was populated solely by people who wanted to get something from him. He was addled by despair and loneliness.
Michael threw all of his heartache into this beautiful song of loss and pain. The story goes that he was recording the song, got to that line, and just broke down into tears. His producer, Quincy Jones, asked him to record it again. Again, the same thing happened at the same point in the song. Four times, five, six, eight, he kept bursting into tears at the same moment.
Eventually, Quincy realized that the song was telling them that this is how it wanted to be. And so they left it. And it remains one of the most deeply vulnerable, revealing, and beautiful moments I’ve ever heard in a piece of music.
Could we all draw inspiration from this story to reexamine our relationship with crying while we sing? Could we let go of the idea that it’s a failure if we break down, and instead view it as a gift we could offer to our audience? By allowing ourselves to feel and express what we are feeling, we invite others to experience their own emotional landscape in a new way. We give voice to emotions that others may not have even known they had. And it gives the audience the opportunity to connect more deeply with themselves and with others in an intimate, communal experience of shared vulnerability.
As singers, we are alchemists. We take the raw materials of our own lives, emotions and the world around us and transmute them into sound. Just as all emotion isn’t pretty and perfect, so too all sound doesn’t have to be. Just as there is beauty in a pure tone and rich resonance, can there also be beauty in ugliness, grief, things falling apart with no plan for how they will be reassembled?
I say yes, my loves, I absolutely say yes.
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