The Old Songs

Like our highways and roads, most of the songs that we sing are sprinkled with potholes. These musical pitfalls, unless you know how to avoid them, can cause bumps in your performance. What exactly are musical potholes, and how can we cover them over to make our performances as smooth as possible for our audiences?

Musical potholes

Musical potholes are the little things in a song — note intervals, lyrics, word combinations, consonants — that make understanding the song a challenge to the listener.

Our job as singers is not as easy as we might think. We have to do extra work so that the audience doesn’t have to. What do I mean?

How often have you heard a song on the radio or elsewhere, and wondered: “What did they say?” Once you saw the lyrics printed out, or had someone else tell you what that line was, only then did you say: “Oh, now I understand!”

We must work extra hard to make the lyrics understandable so that the audience members don’t have to wonder what we just sang. Let me give you some examples from the music my chorus is doing on St. Patrick’s Day.

Examples

In the song At the End of a Cobblestone Road is the lyric: “from my Ireland, far over the sea.” If the singer doesn’t take the extra effort to pronounce the “r” in Ireland, the line sounds like: “from my island, far over the sea.”

The introduction to It’s a Great Day for the Irish contains another pothole. “March 17″ is difficult to sing because of the “ch” on the end of the first word, and the “s” sound on the beginning of the next word. The singer must put out the extra effort to pronounce the “ch” sound in the word March before singing the next word. It takes thoughtfulness to do this right.

Here are some other lyrical potholes to avoid:

• Sing hour whenever you see the word our — otherwise, it comes across as are.
• Sing your and you’re like it rhymes with sewer. Without that effort, it can sound like yore.
• Sing aisle whenever you come across the work I’ll — otherwise, the word sounds like ahl.
• Sing difficult words, like there’ll, with the extra effort that it takes to pronounce all the syllables.

There are other potholes that are hidden in our music. I’d like to hear from you about the others that you have come across, and how you avoid them.

Bottom line

The bottom line is this: Singing well is more than just learning the notes, the words, the choreography, and the dynamics. You must also make the conscious effort to find those potholes and do what it takes to smooth over them so that your audience doesn’t have a bumpy ride.

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