The best way to approach a new song is from the ground up, like you’re building a house. Start with the basics and then get more specific.
If you’re new to singing, be gentle with yourself and understand that learning to sing is a process and isn’t going to happen overnight.
So try not to judge yourself and to “ballpark” a lot of things. Our voice is a muscle, and so is the ear. Everything is gradually learning to work together, like the muscles of the hand flexing and releasing.
First step: mark the breaths
With a new song, first of all sing it through and mark the breaths. Most of the time this is obvious, but if you’re unsure, let it be with the meter of the lyrics, and by that I mean where you would naturally breathe when having a conversation.
So often you hear a singer take a breath at the wrong time in a sentence when a different focus would get a much more powerful result. For example the sentence: ‘I need to tell you I love you’. Let’s say it takes a long time in the song to get to ‘I love you’ and you need a lot of breath. If you haven’t plotted where the breath comes in the song, breathing at the wrong place would ruin the emotion. ‘I need to tell…you I love you’ has a lot less impact than ‘I need to tell you…I LOVE YOU!’ You give yourself a run up to the emotion, take a breath (and leeway is always allowed for emotion, so you can afford to take your time), then you have the breath to give the buzzwords of the sentence real emotional impact.
Telling the story of the song
Once the breaths are in place, then it’s time to look at the general shape of the song:
Where are the dramatic high spots of the song?
What is/are the underlying emotion/s?
How is the story told?
Read the lyrics through a couple of times and feel the emotion, feel how the song naturally builds and releases. As you read the lyrics, try to express emotion from the diaphragm, not from the throat.
Then try and find the subtext in the song. If it’s a happy song, read it in a sad way as well. Make up a story to go along with it, make it personal if needs be or create a narrative about it that feels real to you, that you can connect with.
Then read the lyrics in a way that incorporates both.
Then sing the song simply expressing the emotions of the song in the moment and see what happens.
It can be helpful to remember that singing a song well takes a lot of practice. There’s a lot to remember, a lot we have to practice technically and emotionally so that we can “just let go” and trust the body to do it automatically.
By practicing the poetry of the lyrics, it connects us to the basic feeling of a song. The path is:
Connect with the emotion, let go, then give the song to the diaphragm and instinct.
The “build” of the song
Now it’s time to look at the “build” of the song.
Where is the dramatic high spot, and how does the breathing lead up to it? (Keeping in mind there are usually a number of dramatic high spots. For example, a “standard” 2 verses, middle 8, verse song. There might be a highlight at the end of each verse, a breather in the middle when the story goes deeper or highlights a different aspect of the emotion, then a winding down at the end. Sometimes a song starts with a big emotion and keeps that up throughout. It’ll be obvious if you read the lyrics aloud like a poem).
Look at the technical challenges
1. Can you manage the high note?
2. Where are the difficult vowels?
3. Practice the whole song with the “Dead mouth” technique, connecting the note to the diaphragm via the larynx, described in the Level 1 videos.
4. Now relax the jaw (imagining there’s just air at the sides of the jaw, no tension) and open up on the high notes, smiling at the back of the throat as you do so, everything wide and free.
5. Now sing the song, allowing yourself to feel the emotion, tasting every word like it’s a delicious cake, savoring the consonants, letting every note resonate in the center of the body as much as you can.
When we sing, we can’t place every note with the mind; we’re snowboarding down a mountain trying to be as present as possible and hoping we get to the bottom in one piece. By practicing a song as minutely as possible, studying every angle, you’re imprinting the emotion memory into the body so that you can then trust it to deliver when you’re performing the song. Then, rather than trying to sing a song, you’re present in the experience while at the same time coming from a place of mastery and relaxation.
Once you feel you have these basics in place, and you’re ready to sing the song as a true performance, FORGET EVERYTHING YOU’VE LEARNED AND JUST SING THE SONG, TRUSTING THAT YOUR EMOTION MEMORY WILL REMEMBER EVERYTHING YOU’VE PROGRAMMED IN!