Name: Claire Dickson

Nationality: American

Occupation: Vocalist, composer, producer
Current Release: Claire Dickson's The Beholder / In the Night is out via New Amsterdam.

If you enjoyed this Claire Dickson interview and would like to stay up to date on her music and releases, visit her official homepage. She is also on Instagram, Facebook, and bandcamp.



Do you think that some of your earliest musical experiences planted a seed for your interest in your voice and singing? How and when did you start singing?

My dad is a musician and very early on in life I was going to concerts, singing, and listening to music at home.

I have loved singing and music since I can remember.

If you're also playing other instruments, how does the expressive potential of these compare to your own voice?

The voice has always felt incredibly intuitive and fluent for me.

Musical ideas exist within the embodied experience of vocalizing, and I often draw from this instinctual vocabulary when I’m working with other instruments.

What were some of the main challenges in your development as a singer/vocalist? Which practices, exercises, or experiences were most helpful in reaching your goals – were there also “harmful” ones?

I became serious about my singing in high school as a jazz vocalist. Much of my vocal development was facilitated by transcribing solos and learning jazz repertoire and harmony. Later on, I worked with vocal teachers to learn vocal technique and broaden and strengthen my voice.

To me, an aspect of music and art making is the gentle exploration and acknowledgement of physical limits.The voice is such an exciting medium to work with in this regard because all at once it has so much power and flexibility as well as fragility and precarity.

How do you see the relationship between harmony, rhythm and melody? Do you feel that honing your sense of rhythm and groove has an effect on your singing skills?

In my compositions they are one organism. The percussion I use in my songs is often pitched and the grooves have a melodic quality to me. Melody is embedded in harmonic and rhythmic information. They can be parsed out, of course.

I practice with a metronome a lot, I sit with harmony without structured time (although I think music like this still has a sense of rhythm), I create unmoored melodies, and these exercises help me to be more specific in what I’m creating.

In general, I think of harmony, rhythm, and melody as features of perception that are not intrinsic to sound. As a musician, I am pulling various attentional strings to create a sonic experience that can reference a possible shared perceptual vocabulary but also disrupt it.

What moves you in the voices of other singers?

Voices are so interesting and communicative.

When a singer allows their interiority to catch on the texture of their voice, I am moved.

How would you describe the physical sensation of singing? [Where do you feel the voice, do you have a visual sensation/representation, is there a sense of release or tension etc …]

Ideally, the physical sensation of singing can activate the entire body. This happens both at the level of sound production and spatializing once the sound leaves the body.

Because of its close relationship with sensation, I find that singing always orients me to where I am in terms of my physical state, how relaxed or comfortable or awake I am, and also to my surroundings, the acoustics or what other sounds are in the room.

We have a speaking voice and a singing voice. Do these feel like they are natural extensions of each other, ends on a spectrum or different in kind?

Natural extensions of each other.

The divisions I make are more along the lines of functional and poetic, textural and linguistic, but all can be in the speaking or singing modes, or somewhere in between.

From whispers to screams, from different colours to dynamics, what are the potentials and limits of your voice? How much of your vocal performance can and do you want to control?

To me, vocal control is cumulative and it is mostly a sense of confidence and effortlessness sufficient to set the conditions for fluency responding in the moment and risk-taking.

My idea of vocal control is being able to take risks, do things with my voice I’m unsure if I can do, and then succeed.

When you're writing song lyrics, do you sense or see a connection between your voice and the text? Does it need to feel and sound “good” or “right” to sing certain words? What's your perspective in this regard of singing someone else's songs versus your own?

I like that you identified this feeling of good or right, I use it as a heuristic in a lot of my songwriting. This is how I think about it: in song, information is being communicated on multiple meaning-making planes, making it possible for meanings to co-occur and express complexity. Just as the vocal prosody impacts the meaning of phrases in social communication, melody, harmony, rhythm, texture, and the voice do so in song.

I think the setting of a melody feels good when layers of meaning in the music have an inner logic. Sometimes it’s impossible or uninteresting to me to identify that inner logic on the spot, but I often find it later!

For example, as I am now reflecting on the melody of "The Beholder," I notice that the phrase “let go symmetry, leave the center of the room” has a melody with an almost symmetrical quality with “symmetry” set to a symmetrical triplet, but the symmetry is interrupted in the latter part of the phrase, starting on the word “leave” and veering off completely on “room.”



The melody of “center” references that of “symmetry,” connecting those concepts and centering them while making an effort to move in more dispersed and asymmetrical movements.

How has technology, such as autotune or effect processing, impacted singing? Has it been a concrete influence on your own approach?

I think processing gives vocalists (and musicians of other instruments) a new dimension to their instrument with all the accompanying demands of technique, fluency, and self expression.

It definitely changes how I sing, and I have a specific set of vocabulary that I use with the processing - it isn’t additive, it’s interactive.