Musycks Musings & Topical Tips 01:
You’re The Voice?

A new weekly column by Inside Songwriting contributor, Michael J Roberts.

So it’s that time of year again, The Voice hits our TV screens like a karaoke Godzilla and it’s singers akimbo as closed eyed, try-hards preen and vocal cords are stretched to within an inch of their lives! I get to indulge this guilty pleasure because my darling wife insists on tuning in, and I do get a workout as I heckle the screen mercilessly, so there is an up side. Apart from the ‘bread and circus’ aspect of these singing shows, what do they really represent in terms of the industry and what can we learn?

For a singer-songwriter it’s apparent that original songs are mostly unwelcome in this format. It’s a brave performer who would trot out their own inferior song in lieu of doing a standard or modern hit, so it’s a forgivable impulse for them to conform and not to queer their chances on the show. The other increasingly apparent aspect of the latest seasons is the propensity to look for a ‘back story’ for a number of the participants, and one that involves a ‘human interest’ angle. It’s no longer good enough just to have a great set of pipes it seems, now you have to have overcome cancer or have gotten over the loss of a loved one etc, which just adds another layer of manipulation to formats already dripping with ways to evince a tear or two from the viewing masses.

The industry will do what it’s good at, exploit the ‘winners’ in every way they can, usually with contracts that are completely weighted to favour the record companies and the writer-producer teams that will provide the songs for the winners. The very best of the singers, and there have been some fine singers who have been unearthed by this method, will find a way to keep working within the industry but this may speak more to their own talent and passion rather than the sausage factory methodology that brought them to public attention in the first place.

Jedi mind tricks

There is also a lesson for the aspiring singer-songwriter here; as I think it does highlight the benefit of having a great voice render your own song. Any singer-songwriter should be wise enough to realistically assess the value of their own singing voice, but that is not as easy as it might sound. I speak as someone with an average voice, I can hold a note and get by in some situations, backing vocals etc, but I don’t have the unmistakeable tone a great singer has and I know that when a fine singer has covered one of my songs the difference is easily heard. Now, this doesn’t make the song any better or worse it just gives the listener an easier way to connect with the material in a way that is so invisible it’s almost a Jedi mind trick. An inferior singer puts a subliminal barrier between the song and the listener and a fine singer with a voice full of tone and ‘soul’ will give any song a better chance of breaking through.

Of course there are good singers and ‘good’ singers, it’s not always about the quality and control of the voice. In the classic rock era we can compare Bob Dylan with Joni Mitchell, both started as folk singers and moved into other areas like rock, blues and jazz fusion. Bob had a “voice like sand and glue” according to David Bowie, but more importantly it was the right voice for his own songs. Bob’s delivery and ability to communicate his own songs trumped the inadequacies in tone and pitch, whereas Joni never sang a false note in her life and had a range that dwarfed the likes of Bob. Again, her character and individuality made her delivery compelling and remarkably, even though she had a technically flawless voice, she also managed to carve a recognisable style as a singer, rather than just imitate her influences.

The New Riders of The Purple Sage

I was driving a long way yesterday, from Queensland to Sydney, so I had a lot of listening time and I got through some fine 1970’s bootleg concerts (thanks to my mate Stuart from Chicago!) and it underlined for me the value of a good singer. During a Grateful Dead show in 1971 the support acts were The New Riders of The Purple sage and The Beach Boys and the value of a great singer could not have been more obvious. The New Riders were essentially a Jerry Garcia side project at the time of the concert and the singers were guitar players John Dawson and David Nelson, who lacked nothing in enthusiasm but the results were less than optimal! They also added insult to injury by covering a John Fogerty song, Lodi, and a Band classic, The Weight, where the originals versions have fine vocals attached via Fogerty’s brilliant voice and The Band’s three front line singers, Levon Helm, Richard Manuel and Rick Danko. I know the crowd would have been ‘well seasoned’ to say the least, but the New Riders sounded like amateurs in the singing stakes, backed by a fine and tight guitar band with a very tasty pedal steel player (Jerry Garcia) to boot.

The Beach Boys then came on and showed them the value of fine vocal sounds across an earthy and surprisingly rocking band. The Dead, of course, were somewhere in the middle, average singers but in a presentation where the sum of the whole outweighed the sum of the parts as a Dead concert experience was always more than fine playing and capable, if unremarkable voices. The aforementioned The Band is a classic case in point, where although the bulk of their songs were written by Robbie Robertson, the singing was done by the other members, all of whom had fine, character laden voices. If Robertson had not recognised the limits of his own voice (he went on and made several solo albums where he did sing) the results of the recordings would have been staggeringly different. Remember, the songs would have been the same, but our access point as regarding an authoritative lead vocal would have changed.

The Dave Rawlings Machine

I also listened to some live shows by a more recent band, The Dave Rawlings Machine. But the lesson was the same. As with the New Riders the Machine is a side project for Gillian Welch and Dave and features some of the boys from Old Crow Medicine Show. Dave’s voice as a solo performer is passable, but not the remarkable instrument that Gillian’s is, and the net effect is that of missed opportunities. The joy of the performance and the engaging nature of the live presentation is not in doubt, but when Gillian steps forward to do a couple of songs that feature her lead voice, the band step up a gear and the universe is once more in balance. Dave has every right to take out his band in this way, and it is certainly several steps removed from being a ‘vanity’ project, but it slightly undermines the intent of presenting your songs in the best possible light. It is that same aesthetic that infects his album, which is more a curio than a ‘must have’, unlike the work he does with Gillian. If Dave had used Gillian as the lead singer on his remarkably beautiful song Bells of Harlem, instead of singing it himself, it would be a standard in the modern American song canon by now.

Try not to confuse the two!

Hopefully now it’s clear that a singer-songwriter would do well to think hard about the value of their own voice in relation to the songs they write. In some cases it may be a writer will have songs that are well suited to other singers and therefore don’t need to remain in the singer-songwriter set, if so that’s a good way to separate the songs you write for yourself, and songs you write for others. It may be easier said than done, but try not to confuse the two, that way there be madness!

Happy Songwriting.

Musycks

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