Magic. You Are It. Be It by Gary M. Douglas & Dain C. Heer

Author:Gary M. Douglas & Dain C. Heer [Douglas, Gary M. & Heer, Dain C.]
Language: swe
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781409230298
Google: ySNuPwAACAAJ
Publisher: Lulu.com
Published: 2009-01-06T15:30:55+00:00

Chapter Thirteen

Lyrics

Sometimes singers do not understand their lyrics, and sometimes they have to create the emotions being expressed in the songs they sing. We coached a woman who was singing “Stormy Weather.” She was saying it’s stormy weather because she lost her man, but she didn’t mean it. Maybe she was thinking, I finally got rid of that son of a bitch, and now I’m happy. It wasn’t real to her that it was stormy weather because she and her man weren’t together. Maybe for her, it was sunny weather.

A different song that was more in line with what was real to her might have been a better choice. But, really, do performers sing lyrics because they’re real to them, or do they perform lyrics for people who have those lines as their point of view? We asked her to go out fifty miles in all directions and see all the people who were longing for their loved one and missing their man or their woman and saying, Oh, poor me. We asked her to bring that energy into her body, and when she did so, to notice where her throat clamped down. Then, we asked her to sing from that place, to create the emotion of the song. There’s a clamp in the throat, and people who are in that emotion function from that place. It’s where they speak from when they say, “I’m missing my man. What am I going to do without my lover? I’m going to die.”

She did that. She picked up the energy of the song and when she started to sing again, her voice quavered with the emotion, and it was so moving that people in the audience started to cry.

Here’s something you can do as an example, right now: Go out one hundred miles in all directions and feel all the homeless people in the world and think about being a homeless person. Feel the energy of that. Pull that energy into your body. What closes down on you? If you were going to play the part of a homeless person or if you were going to sing as a homeless person, you would have to be able to pull that energy into your body and find a place you could speak or sing it from. You would have to deliver the words and the energy from that place, because that’s the truth of being there. That’s what creates a great performance, as opposed to a good one.

When we’ve done this exercise in our workshops, we hear qualities come into people’s voices that we didn’t hear before. Pulling that energy in creates a vibrato and suddenly the emotion is there. It’s a way of embodying the energy of the lyrics. What comes out of performers’ mouths is the emotion those people live. This also works for actors and actresses.

I (Gary) worked with an actress who was going to play a queen.

She said, “I’m just not able to cut it with this part.”

I said,

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